My best best advice to Charles and Camilla – hire a jester

One of my secret ambitions has always been to become an agony aunt. To those who might suggest that my own life has not been a triumph of good judgment, I can only point to the archetype of the wounded healer. An aunt with a little agony of her own in her past is probably marginally more useful than one without.

Now, at this historic moment in the history of our royal family as the Prince of Wales and his new wife embark on their uncertain future, I feel they are much in need of bracing advice from someone who is neither nastily republican nor uncritically royalist. I can’t resist the temptation to offer some, particularly to Camilla.

I would not presume to offer any purely personal advice; after more than three decades of getting used to each other’s foibles they clearly don’t need any. But the advice they desperately need is about public relations. Despite the best efforts of courtiers, Sir Alan Fitztightlys, flunkies, and PR people, Prince Charles has been a PR nightmare since he left prep school.

I did in a small (and rather ridiculous) way try. When my uncle William Staveley was First Sea Lord in the 1980s, he was so taken aback by my diatribes against the princely prattishness — I was an exact contemporary of Prince Charles at Cambridge — that he challenged me to make an offer of my PR services, which he would convey to the prince’s people. Nothing came of it but a lot of princely procrastination.

What I wanted to tell him was how out of touch he appeared to his 1960s contemporaries and how disastrous it was for the monarchy.

As an increasingly reluctant royalist I still almost believe that Charles and Camilla could somehow turn the republican tide if they get things right now. It’s not impossible that they may become a popular king and queen and carry on having a high old time in private too.

My first suggestion as agony aunt is that Camilla should associate this marriage and herself with popular generosity. She should get Prince Charles to give, in her name, the gardens of Buckingham Palace to the public as a wedding present. Or she should get him to get the Queen to do it. That would be a sensational display of open-handedness. If it indirectly eclipsed the risible Diana fountain, so what? It would also be smart to give some treasures from the royal art collection to galleries across the country — just how many Leonardo drawings does one need? “Oh reason not the need” as poor King Lear said when his cruel daughters were trying to cut his pomp and ceremony. But Shakespeare was writing in the 17th century.

Even more importantly, Camilla should persuade Charles to have a black equerry or two. She should appoint a British Asian lady-in-waiting or two herself. To invite people of ethnic minorities into the top of the royal household would send a distinctly inclusive message. If, that is, anyone from an ethic minority could be found to take it on; some of Prince Charles’ most loyal helpers have been badly treated.

Camilla should also persuade Charles to say nothing more than the bare conventional minimum in public. Their public apologies for their sins in church should be their last. Never apologise, never explain, and never confess. Most of the woes of Windsor can be traced to Prince Charles’s semi-confessional interview — to tell a part of the truth is more dangerous than lying. Since royalty is such an untenable idea these days the less said about it the better. Royalty cannot bear too much explanation.

Camilla should also get Charles to stop being political and stop holding forth about contentious issues. The constitutional price of monarchy is a buttoned lip.

And no more family photographs, no more cynical happy family spin, no more vulgar family Christmas cards. There is surely nothing wrong with a classy Madonna and child reproduction from the royal collection.

It is unwise to try to change your man too much once you’ve married him, but Camilla is in an unusual situation. I think she owes it to the nation and to the house of Windsor to get Charles to change his clothes. Fancy dress for public ritual is one thing and perhaps Prince Philip is right when he says people like it. Side vents are quite another. Side vents like Prince Charles’s shriek snobbish old fart. So do his kilts and shooting and stalking kit.

There is nothing clever about archaic 19th-century garments in bogus tweed that get rainsoaked, cold and heavy when anyone can afford state-of-the-art, 21st-century light weatherproof clothing.

Clothes do matter, for a public figure. They send clear messages that people well understand. The Edwardian gent idiom is not the way forward for a people’s prince; it has been the Edwardian tendency, in manners and morals, that has got Prince Charles into most of his many troubles. Besides, British fashion for men — and I don’t mean Savile Row — and British designer casual clothes still lead the world.

I don’t think Camilla needs to worry what she wears; the less stylish she is the better, sadly, in the empty shoes of Lady Di, and Mrs Average everywhere will be secretly on her side.

Camilla’s main problem, however, will be how to stay sane, if only to keep the royal show on the road. It may not have escaped her attention that a lot of princesses in her position have gone mad. Celebrity is bad enough but the real problem is palace flunkies, many of them crazed with royal razzmatazz and fancy dress.

My experience of those who’ve suddenly moved into the butler-hiring classes is that they quickly come to feel butler-worthy. Having many servants is corrupting. Like great wealth it makes one take oneself more seriously than one otherwise would. Getting rather grand is all too easy and all too disastrous; for one thing it makes you take less grand people less seriously, especially as you have less and less to do with them and understand them less and less.

My advice to Camilla is to rescue Prince Charles from all this by firing as many flunkies and servants as possible; she should banish most courtiers and get Charles to live much less ceremoniously in private. Public ceremony needn’t entail private grandeur.

Even better, Camilla should follow the traditional expedient of hiring a court jester — a licensed fool with nothing to lose, who is free to tell the painful truth when nobody else dares, as it seems not even Camilla has dared to do. I’ve tried to think of candidates for this centrally important role — Sir Alan Sugar, Rory Bremner and Charles Kennedy.

So many otherwise rational people go soft in the head when confronted with a royal presence. I will never forget talking at a big opening party to the host, who was a pillar of the intellectual left. Suddenly his face took on an expression of astonishing deference and smarm because he was being approached by the Duchess of York. When closet republicans are mad about royal highness, how can princes stay sane?

Camilla must resist this ferociously; one can only hope she isn’t already addicted. The future of the royal family is in her hands, just as oddly enough it was once in Diana’s.

Freedom is admitting men and women are different

To generalise is to be an idiot, said the poet William Blake. How seductive that sounds. Generally speaking, however, it’s not true. Generalisations can be useful; without them there would be no science and it is quite reasonable to make cautious generalisations. But everyone knows what Blake meant. Generalisations are very often abused in an idiotic way, which makes people understandably angry.

Women, particularly, have been enraged with good reason by centuries of generalisations about them, mostly put forth by men. Sometimes these generalisations have simply been ignorant or wrong. At other times, though reasonable, they have idiotically been applied to individual women as in: “You can’t map-read, because women can’t.”

When I was growing up it was commonly assumed that girls weren’t as clever as boys: girls couldn’t do maths or science, girls couldn’t get firsts when they did somehow squeak into a top university, girls were too interested in babies to do top jobs, and so on. This enraged and discouraged me, especially on the lips of some spotty boy with only half as many O-levels as I had. And at that time (though I didn’t know it until recently) girls actually outperformed boys at 11-plus, so their marks were adjusted down to produce equal results. I had enormous sympathy, therefore, with the rage that inflamed the feminist auto-da-fe of the 1970s.

But it seemed to me even then that feminists were simply exchanging one idiotic generalisation — that women are inferior to men — for another — that women are just the same as men. They claimed that the obvious differences between sexes and individuals were due to nurture, not nature. The idea that people might have differences in inherited tendencies was anathema. Environment was everything; the human mind was a tabula rasa, an empty slate.

Given an equal chance, according to this tragically mistaken view, women would not only do as well as men, they would do the same. And if they weren’t doing just the same, that could only be because of sexist discrimination against them.

Since the 1970s there have been some variations on this unreasonable theme. One is the current view, based on two mutually exclusive assumptions, that women are just the same as men and also better than men — equally able in every way but more caring, co-operative, peaceable and so on.

An alternative has been the accurate observation that women often have different priorities from men and don’t always choose to break through the glass ceiling, even when more than capable of doing so.

Meanwhile, women and girls have been catching up fast, and overtaking, at least in exam results. Last week, for instance, the first results of the national “foundation stage profile” showed that girls outstrip boys in every area before the age of five. They are just better at everything, particularly emotional and interpersonal skills (as most people know). But the gap narrowed very significantly in the area of maths, knowledge of the world, shapes, dimensions and measures.

However, the old underlying assumption has been surprisingly long-lived in many circles, not least at ultra-liberal Harvard University. Last Tuesday Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, was humiliated by a vote of no confidence from his faculty. His offence was that he had dared to suggest that one of the reasons why fewer women get top academic jobs in science and maths might have to do with their “intrinsic aptitude”.

He had thus deviated from the orthodoxy that men and women have equal abilities in all fields, and where they are not equally represented that is proof of sexist discrimination. This despite the well-documented fact that male IQ is over-represented at the highest and lowest extremes of intelligence. Statistically you would expect more male geniuses than female, which is what we get. Female intelligence clusters round the norm.

However, as of last week that persistent orthodoxy has become still more untenable. A major international research team led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge has been mapping the X chromosome — “the most extraordinary in the human genome”, according to its team leader — and on Thursday it published its results in the science magazine Nature.

In headline speak, this huge study reveals the X factor that explains why the sexes are so different. “In essence,” according to one of the authors, Hunt Willard, “there is not one human genome but two: male and female.” This is revolutionary stuff.

The X chromosome study provides coherent explanations for very complex differences between the sexes, including men’s vulnerability to many serious genetic disorders; what it does not provide is any excuse for sexist triumphalism on either side, or for particularising from the general.

The implications seem to me both simple and encouraging. It seems clear that it is wrong to assume all boys and girls should be educated in the same way. What’s needed is choice. Some girls do very well in a competitive, exam-driven atmosphere; some boys might prefer the female conventions of continuous assessment.

It’s often said that girls’ recent successes have to do with female teaching styles that suit them better than boys; perhaps failing boys could be helped with a very different, single-sex approach tailored to their needs. Parents and children should decide what’s best. Schools should be free to offer varying idioms of education; and there should be setting and streaming in all schools — it is ridiculous to imagine that all boys and girls of the same age could possibly thrive in the same classroom.

In employment we should dump the obsession with sex equality, or “equity” as people annoyingly call it. This obsession is based on the assumption that fairness to both sexes is a crude 50-50 split — in the boardroom, the lecture room, the physics lab, in middle management, in nursing. It is now clearly outdated. People vary, both inside and outside their gender, for all kinds of reasons. No employer should be expected to iron out these complexities.

Trying to impose a mistaken idea of fairness is horribly unfair to everyone, counter-productive and extremely expensive. One cannot impose fairness by numbers. All one can do is try harder to promote fairness to individuals, on merit — to protect them from unthinking generalisations about the group to which they belong. This would mean more industrial tribunals, perhaps, but far fewer regulations absolutely certainly.

Imagine the sighs of relief when all the “equity” guidelines and audits and best practice and Investors in People documents could be cast onto a bonfire of red tape. Whole local authority departments could be axed, armies of public sector workers redeployed in real jobs. Imagine the savings of public money.

We’re all supposed to celebrate diversity these days. Perhaps we should actually do so by freely admitting and celebrating the many and varied differences between men and women, wherever they appear, without trying to control and reform them. Vivent les différences.

Just listen … The Archers is telling us how to live

For years I have been ashamed of my addiction to The Archers. My family despise me for it and I accept their contempt with humility. They are right. The Archers is drivel. It’s the worst of English right-on whimsy. It’s not country life, it’s not nostalgia — it’s Islington-on-the-Wold. It’s probably damaging my brain and I should kick the habit. The fact that lots of my friends and acquaintances have the same terrible addiction is no excuse, I know.

Just because middle-class mummies across the nation tune in every night at seven while they chop organic courgettes or rip open Tesco ready meals does not mean that I should, I know.

But I carry on listening. I neglect my children and their homework for the sake of desperately dull characters that

I would cross the road to avoid. I can’t help myself. I can’t explain. That terrible, jaunty tune draws me in like the call of a bourgeois siren.

However, the weakness you can accept in yourself can be shocking in other people. I was amazed to hear the voice of Stephen Fry on the radio last week exclaiming how much he loves The Archers. How can this be possible, I asked myself. Fry is educated, intelligent, witty, intellectual, bohemian. He is far too sophisticated to have any time at all for the implausible and tedious niceness of The Archers, the opiate of the middle classes, surely? But so it is, apparently.

Not only Fry. It soon emerged that Victoria Wood also has this terrible habit. Actually I don’t find that quite so strange; I have never found her anything other than very conventional. Be that as it may, various glitterati, including the brilliant Sir Ian McKellen, had got together for last week’s Red Nose Day to compete for a starring role on Friday in a special spoof Archers episode written by Ms Wood.

Radio 4 listeners could give money to Comic Relief by paying for telephone votes and in the event Fry won. “Oh lordy, lordy,” he said. “It sounds like it’s Christmas. I couldn’t be more thrilled . . . I remember sitting at my mother’s knee listening to The Archers’ music. It’s just stitched into the fabric of my being.” Well fancy that, one can only say.

The Archers has 5m weekly listeners and millions more who have never heard it but know about it; it has entered popular culture.

What can account for the mysterious power of this ludicrous series? The usual explanation, which is true of all soap series, is that familiarity alone is comforting to the point of addiction. Friends, to which my children are addicted, is even worse drivel than The Archers. Neighbours was (when I last saw it) remarkably similar — and so was Coronation Street.

However, characters in soap fiction become part of your life to an extent that simply doesn’t bear too much examination. There was a moment in my childhood when Benny, the daffy young handyman in Crossroads, had flu in one episode. Tens if not 100s of viewers sent him woolly hats to keep him warm. Real woolly hats for a completely unreal person. Even as a child I realised this cast a disturbing light on some viewers’ grasp of reality.

With The Archers, though, I think there is a further explanation — one that deals with the strange appeal of the series to liberal intellectuals like Stephen Fry.

It’s not just that it fills the veg-prep quarter-hour for the Radio 4 listening classes, between the news and whatever is next. It’s that The Archers is covertly the archaic voice of the man from Whitehall, who always knows best what is good for us.

The series was conceived in 1951, in the post-war spirit of Clement Attlee, as an educational drama about farming. Note the idea of education; 1951 was the time of the new welfarism, the new nationalisation and state cod liver oil for all children — continuing the habit of extreme government control that had been formed during the war.

The man in Whitehall had become used to restraining our speech, moulding our minds and our bodies and administering our housing and our money. The habit did not end with the hostilities.

This mentality has been a long time a-dying. In fact it is still undead and 60 years later survives here and there throughout new Labour, our public services and not least the BBC. The Archers is still public education of the most paternalist sort. And it is a daily reaffirmation of values for those who share its mindset.

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that The Archers helps to reinforce the quasi-religious beliefs of the past half-century in state provision, particularly in monolithic state schooling and the monolithic National Health Service. It is truly remarkable that many listeners are people who do not consciously identify with the programme’s central assumptions and implicit political stance. I hope that fans will not take me up on particular issues, such as foxhunting, on which the series has been even-handed. I am talking about its deeper assumptions.

If you want to know what is the proper or politically correct approach to anything, you have only to switch on The Archers. The right, decent, caring line on inclusion or grieving or fostering or breast cancer or rape or private schools or anorexia or social workers will be revealed through a clunking plot. And all these “issues” come into the story with almost surreal regularity. Life in Ambridge has the curious quality of being both exhausting and dull.

Inclusion and positive discrimination are the agenda. So we have had an Indian woman lawyer with a charming auntie, a gay chef followed by several gays, a female vicar, a motherless black daughter for the new male vicar and so on. It is a bit heavy, but it is educational in more than one way. It teaches you not just what to think but what, according to contemporary orthodoxy and the bien pensant man in Whitehall, you are supposed to think. Perhaps this is why The Archers is so acceptable to the old and new Labour luvvies, deeply conventional as they so often are.

Occasionally the series does lurch in the direction of art and anarchy. Once when I was begging my son to let me switch to the programme in the car, I told him (lying, as all addicts do) that it could sometimes be really interesting. He was incredulous but agreed and soon we were listening, laughing helplessly, as that maddening tune faded away to the sound of poor demented grandpa Joe Grundy solemnly bashing out the brains of his pet ferrets, crooning tenderly to them all the while. It was pure Cold Comfort Farm. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode did not live up to this early comic promise. It’s very difficult to be right-on and funny at the same time, except unconsciously.

The Archers would make wonderful comedy. Wood’s spoof episodes last week, although patchy and heavy-handed, proved that it has enormous potential as an entirely different kind of show. It would take only a very little light rewriting to make it absolutely farcical and hilarious..

It might also be politically subversive, which seems to be what all comedy writers think they ought to be but rarely are. Then perhaps addicts like me would not need to be ashamed any more.

As the unsayable becomes sayable, Tory fortunes rise

One opinion poll does not make a political new dawn. Last week an ICM poll in The Guardian found that Labour’s lead over the Conservatives had fallen from nine percentage points to only three. Then on Friday a Mori poll in the Financial Times suggested that Labour now had only a two-point lead.

Not surprisingly the Conservatives rejoiced. But all too soon it appeared to be a false dawn. Also on Friday a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph reported bad news for them. Whereas last month, according to YouGov, the two parties were only one percentage point apart, Labour had now regained its six-point lead and the Conservatives appeared to be back to where they were in the political doldrums.

All the same something new is happening. The political wind really is beginning to change; the tide is beginning to turn. After not months but years of despair and self-doubt — self-loathing even — the Conservatives are beginning to rediscover themselves.

They are beginning to abandon their modernist attempts to steal new Labour clothes. They are feeling less ashamed of naked Conservatism. They are even beginning — though who only a few weeks ago would have thought it remotely possible? — to set the agenda and to scare Labour strategists into defensive, copycat reactions.

I don’t think this has much to do with the Conservatives’ new political orgasmatron, the American Voter Vault database programme, or Lynton Crosby, their sophisticated new campaign director. I think his recent successes in rallying and marketing the Conservatives would have been impossible if the political tide had not subtly begun to turn already. The interesting question is what has been making it turn.

It is clearly not yet anything to do with the economy or with public contempt for the prime minister’s lies about Iraq.

This change is due to the persistent, indefatigable efforts over many years of many individuals and small groups — not focus groups or highly paid spin doctors and publicity juju men, but intelligent and idealistic people on the right and centre right — who have tried to understand what matters in British society and to explain it to others.

Some of them are even journalists. But most are independent-minded people in think tanks and research groups. They have quietly and unglamorously been carrying the small “c” conservative torch where most Conservative politicians have been failing to lead at all, or even to agree among themselves. In the midst of the bitter Tory rout they have been preparing the intellectual way for a real opposition.

If you consider immigration and asylum, the recent change in public and political perception is due almost entirely to one man.

In 2001 it was impossible to excite the electorate about the chaos of the immigration system. William Hague’s attempts to do so in his campaign blew up in his face. He was accused of playing the race card and even his middle-class supporters were embarrassed. But whatever his motives, he was right.

The unacceptable truth was (then as now) that there was no immigration policy: immigration into this country was largely out of control; the asylum system was being abused in huge numbers with impunity; great social strains were emerging as a result; and the public had been lied to for years about all this. However, the electorate simply wasn’t prepared at that time to hear the truth.

Now it is. The Mori poll for the Financial Times showed that immigration and asylum were now rated the single most important issue by 23% of the electorate and one of the most important two or three by 40%. And it is not only indigenous people who are worried — 52% of ethnic minorities are, too (according to Mori in 2003), and probably more today.

So when at the end of January this year Michael Howard started talking tough on immigration, the Labour strategists — instead of sneering about Tories playing the race card or the numbers game — were panicked into talking tough too. They find themselves on the back foot over immigration largely because of the work of Sir Andrew Green, a former diplomat who runs a small independent research group called Migrationwatch UK.

Almost single-handedly and by using the government’s own figures he has blasted away the nonsense and right-on platitudes about immigration numbers and asylum abuse. It cannot be much fun; the work is highly contentious and rather boring too. It is difficult to accuse him of racism, but he is loathed in Whitehall, not least because the mandarins can never find anything wrong with his figures. Now that the media trusts them too, and publicises them, and the public believes them, the Conservatives are able to campaign about immigration without being howled down as racists.

What’s more, new Labour is being forced by the facts on to conservative territory, to follow a Tory lead. The change of mood here is almost amazing. The unsayable has become sayable and Labour policy. In mid-February the Conservatives revealed plans for compulsory health checks on migrants — taking a leaf from new Labour, they were announcing something they’d announced before — and Labour responded, almost incredibly, by saying that such health checks were its policy too.

There are signs of the same change in the national conversation about public spending. For years the orthodoxy has been that more public spending must be better. People against more public spending were by definition heartless, just as privatisation and profit were heartless. A Labour politician had only to cry “Tory cuts” to win any argument.

But after Labour boosted budgets by tens of billions in its second term the Conservatives produced their meticulous James review of what the taxpayer had got in return. Public-spending cuts are beginning to mean cutting waste, not cutting services.

It was the Tories’ commissioning of the James review that bumped the Labour government into commissioning its own Gershon review of the same subject — waste. New Labour now talks of cuts. But behind both reports is the impetus of many years of solid, unfashionable research by think tanks, and the popular versions of it put out by the media. The Institute of Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Centre for Policy Studies, Politea and Reform — and others — have for years been doggedly trying to point out the errors of the centre left orthodoxy: the dangers of state monopolies, of overregulation, over-taxation and welfare dependency.

Reform opened its presentation last week of its new Manifesto for Reform by stating that a third of the population in the UK received more than half of its income from the state. People are beginning to believe it. Politicians are beginning to feel they can say it without being seen as heartless, capitalist little Englanders.

This may not be a new dawn, but it is the beginning of the end of a long Conservative night, whatever the polls say.

Where the boys show the girls how to do business

There is more than enough reality on television, without reality TV as well. Besides, there is something very odd about the idea of reality TV, as if the humiliation games played by gaggles of ditzy self-publicists were somehow as real, or perhaps even more real, than documentary footage of starving babies and bombed-out villages.

That is an extremely odd idea of reality and I think it contributes to the increasing public mood of unreality. Besides, humiliation is not my idea of a spectator sport.

At least, that is what I always used to feel — until last week.

Last Wednesday I suddenly became a reality TV addict; I am completely hooked on a TV series on BBC2 called The Apprentice; it is Anneka Rice meets John Harvey-Jones meets Anne Robinson, only far more sophisticated, and it is one of the best things that I have seen on television for a long time.

It centres on the astonishingly telegenic figure of Alan Sugar of Amstrad (the electronics group) fame and also of a huge self-made fortune. If he hadn’t made the big time in business, he could certainly have been extremely big in television.

The McGuffin — to use Hitchcock’s word for the central excuse for a drama — is that Sir Alan, as he is always deferentially called by all around him, is prepared to take on a young apprentice, ideally someone much like himself, at a six-figure salary.

We don’t really know what the apprentice will be supposed to do, or whether Sir Alan really needs one, but that doesn’t matter. The point of the show is to find one.

From thousands of hopeful young entrepreneurs across the country, the competitors have been reduced by the programme’s producers to 14 of the most outstanding, seven men and seven women. Rather oddly, they are always known as the boys and the girls, although most of them appear to be in their thirties; the world of the entrepreneur clearly has little time for the locutions of political correctness.

Sir Alan is putting them all up in a luxurious big house overlooking the Thames, plying them with champagne and rich treats to give them a taste of the fruits of entrepreneurial success, as well as impressing us viewers with the glamour of Sir Alan’s way of life.

In each programme he gives the competitors a real entrepreneurial task to do; in the first two they were divided into a girls’ team and a boys’ team. Last week each team had to buy £500 worth of flowers and sell them, somehow, at a profit by the day’s end. In the second week (of which I have seen a preview) they were given two days to research, design, make and present a new child’s toy (with professional help).

After each task they file into a plush boardroom where Sir Alan gives judgment of a breathtaking, gravelly bluntness that I was beginning to think had disappeared in this country; in the end the losing team leader has to choose two other team members to share responsibility for failure; after a painful interview, Sir Alan theatrically pronounces “You’re fired” at one of the three, who then has to wheel a sad suitcase home.

What a joy it is, I am ashamed to say, to watch all these desperately competitive young things fighting like ferrets in a sack. You would have to have a heart of stone not to find it funny, if often rather moving, too.

But beyond that, the whole thing is so unusually interesting. It’s about how business and competition actually work, so much so that it’s positively educational and worth showing in schools. And it throws up all kinds of ideas and possibilities and touches on many profound anxieties.

The first very problematic thing it throws up, or at least the first that struck me, is how hopeless most of the women were (at least when working with other women) compared with the men. They tried to be co-operative and conciliatory (in the way that women are usually supposed to do) but in fact they were constantly quarrelling, sulking, undermining each other and behaving like prima donnas.

They spent quite a lot of time on management speak, about how they see their roles and what they mean by leadership, but they were in fact divided, indecisive and resentful.

The only time when a woman was really decisive, it was in complete defiance of the best judgment of her entire team, although she didn’t really seem able to appreciate that; she even took a vote and then ignored it.

The boys, by contrast, talked a great deal less, co-operated far more, were far more decisive and seemed better able to make the most of each other’s abilities — contrary to all the clichés about gender difference. And they had much more fun.

The mystery of all this was that although the boys’ egos were clearly just as inflated as the girls’ (and probably more so), they were far better at controlling them in the interests of joint success. They seemed instinctively to know how to negotiate between co-operation and competition.

The girls’ dutiful efforts to persuade themselves that loyalty and co-operation were best were at times risible — most evident in the most hopeless cause, with misplaced loyalty. And the girls’ attempts to be manipulative — supposedly a female skill — were obvious and unsuccessful; the boys were much better at it.

Before anyone starts calling me a misogynist, I should say that I have been lucky enough to know or to meet many highly intelligent and successful women. I have also worked very happily indeed with lots of women, both colleagues and bosses, who were as good as, or better than, any man although sometimes in a different style.

I have lived in the Far East, where women have successfully run large and small enterprises, time out of mind. So this is not a rant against women in general. But it is a question. Why do these thirtyish would-be entrepreneurial women put up such a poor performance — so far at least — compared with the men? Is it just more difficult to find entrepreneurial women for some reason, just as it’s difficult to find women physicists and women chess players? (This is the sort of question, incidentally, which is likely to get the president of Harvard University in the United States hounded out of office.) I suspect that it might be a generational thing. Older women are more realistic and more pragmatic. Younger women are confused by conflicting ideas — on the one hand the demands of freebooting entrepreneurialism, and on the other the demands of politically correct, management handbook, personal development corporation-speak.

The boys seem largely indifferent to contemporary management culture and indeed say the most politically incorrect things.

As Sir Alan said about the sales technique of one of them, it may not be pretty but it works.

Entrepreneurialism is not pretty, but it works. And the reality of entrepreneurialism is something that most people in this country know very little about and feel very ambivalent about, important though we all know it is.

That is what, among many other things, makes this programme so addictive.

A few good (brawny) men could pacify our schools

The apathy of the British public is mysterious. Last week’s headlines about education should have driven people into a fury: “1.5m children denied decent education”; “More than one in 10 schools failing, says Ofsted”; “Schools crisis as discipline standards fall in classrooms”; “Curbs on truancy fail to cure school absentee problems”; “£885m blitz fails to get truants back into lessons ”.

The detail behind the headlines is worse and still more depressing. If anything ought to arouse public passion it is the shameful failure of education and the blighted hopes of millions of children, not to mention the damage to society as a whole.

There is an undeniable mass of evidence that British state schools aren’t working. Of course there are some that are good, or good enough. But the failures are extraordinary. In last week’s Ofsted report, David Bell, the chief inspector of schools in England, revealed that 40% of secondary school pupils, nearly 1.5m children, are not getting a decent education, and are “capable of much, much more”.

The proportion of schools where teaching was “only satisfactory” or unsatisfactory had risen slightly to just over 25%. Of 10,000 schools visited since 2001 a tenth had made unsatisfactory, poor or very poor progress.

The proportion of officially failed schools placed in the special measures category rose by nearly a fifth in a year. As for disruptive behaviour in the classroom, only one in three secondary schools was judged to have acceptable standards of behaviour — a worsening of the situation of five years ago.

There was a sharp rise in the percentage of schools where discipline was unsatisfactory or worse, and levels of good behaviour were at their lowest since Labour came to power. These findings are astonishing, especially considering the high priority new Labour promised to give to education, and the huge sums it has thrown at it.

It is an achievement of dome-like proportions to spend £885m since 1997 on measures to improve school attendance without making the slightest dent on the rate of truancy. The rate of absences from school — including absence with permission — has fallen by one percentage point. That is £885m of your money, torn up and scattered to the winds.

The true results of this disaster are plain to see. Last summer Tony Blair was forced to admit that it was indeed a “scandal” that one in four children left primary school without being able to read or count properly. Last December the National Audit Office reported that most school-leavers lacked the literacy and numeracy skills they needed to participate fully in the modern economy. An international survey found that the UK had a higher proportion of adults with poor literacy and numeracy than 13 other developed countries.

The Confederation of British Industry made much the same point, calling it a “national scandal” that leaves employers to “pick up the pieces and the bill” and pointing out that 60% of teenagers leave school without even a grade C in GCSE maths and English. Meanwhile, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has repeatedly approved lowering the pass mark for the national standard in English for 11-year-olds “to maintain standards”. Last year it was cut to 41; in 2002 it was 49. Almost half of universities and (according to the CBI) one in three companies feel obliged to give school-leavers remedial classes in reading and writing.

Need I go on? Government claims about rising standards in schools are ludicrous. How can we possibly have arrived at such a sorry point? More importantly, what, if anything, can be done? There are so many factors, most of them intractable — too few teachers, poorly qualified teachers, mixed ability teaching, excessive “inclusion” of children with severe problems, multiple language problems, disruptive children, bad homes, inadequate parents, absent parents, morale brought low by a bossy but incompetent government and its tangles of red tape, inadequate police support and a culture of low expectation in many schools.

Bad behaviour is one of the most universal problems; teachers cannot teach in a 21st century Bedlam cum Tower of Babel, in fear for their own safety.

Ruth Kelly, the new education secretary, has suddenly come out with a cunning plan of zero tolerance. Yet it seems only days since her predecessor, Charles Clarke, boldly announced his cunning plan to make all schools take their “fair share” of classroom thugs and wreckers, if only to ensure that not just some but all lessons everywhere are undermined. That’s equality, at least. Which, in its usual cynical vacillation, does Labour mean? If either? Zero tolerance makes common sense and would involve removing the school wreckers altogether, to the best of all possible sin bins. But neither could possibly succeed without important changes in the law and in the culture of paranoid anxiety that surrounds children.

I don’t believe in corporal punishment. But the reaction against it has gone to such extremes that you cannot, literally, lay a finger on a child. You will be suspected of sexual motives or of unacceptable aggression. Either way you will be in serious legal trouble. Children are well aware of this and exploit it skilfully.

Yet it is quite impossible to deal with aggressive, semi-feral children without some physical contact, whatever the risk of abuse. There are times when it is right for an adult to restrain a child, perhaps slightly roughly in extremes, or even to hug a child; both are necessary sometimes for authority and discipline and to provide the limits and the encouragement that troubled children need.

Some time ago I heard of a successful project in a sink school in Washington, where SAS-style soldiers were brought in both to be role models for unhappy, fatherless boys and to provide basic discipline, if only by the force of their physical presence; I remember thinking it could never happen here, because of the law.

In the communal garden where I live, one bad boy terrorised all the younger children for months while their parents stood around powerless to stop him for fear of the law. It wasn’t until a brave dad clipped the boy round the ear, to general astonishment, that the problem was solved — illegally. If community responsibility means anything that ought to have been legal.

On the same principle it ought to be possible for two or three teenage thugs to be marched forcibly out of a classroom without the threat of legal action. There ought to be more big brawny men around in schools, perhaps as classroom assistants in the absence of many male teachers, to be bigger than the playground bullies and able to take them on. Teachers need threats and sanctions, not least teachers in sin bins.

It’s true that when discipline in schools was strict it was sometimes excessive. It’s true there were abuses. But I often wonder whether the abuses of today — by schoolchildren against other schoolchildren and even against teachers — aren’t just as bad and more generally disastrous. This will not change unless the law is changed.

Vera, a distorted picture for our shallow society

Popular taste is a good guide to the temper of the times, much more so than highbrow high culture. You can tell much more about how most people felt and what their assumptions were from John Buchan or Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming than from reading what were seen then and since as the best novels of the time.

It is precisely because popular works seem so dated later on that they have something to reveal of their time. Other greater works which have a more universal, timeless quality tell us less about the date in question.

For instance, the thoughtless anti-semitism of both Buchan and Christie, revealed in minor throwaway remarks that were common at the time, is something you will seldom find as an assumption in more intellectual and serious contemporary writers.
Big box office movies of the past unselfconsciously reveal sociological volumes about the status of women through the anachronistic make-up of the female stars alone. What sells in the mass market is revealing.

So what, I have been asking myself glumly, is revealed about the temper of our times by the outstanding popular success of Mike Leigh’s new film, Vera Drake? I can hardly remember a more dazzling reception for a film or a more impassioned mass outburst of respect and affection, with important industry awards and nominations and rave reviews everywhere. I myself was eager to see it since, like millions of other people, I think Leigh at his best is something of a national treasure.

This film is a mass popular triumph but it is also a succès d’estime — perhaps the French phrase will point up its more critical, arty cineaste success. Although there have been a few voices of dissent it has wowed both the critics and the glitterati. But how depressing it all is.

For if the triumph of Vera Drake is any guide to feeling and taste today, then we are living in a time of mass sentimentality, mental laziness and class hatred. I simply cannot understand why people have not recoiled at the film’s obvious dishonesty.

Most obvious of all perhaps is the class stereotyping. All the heart-warmingly good and decent people in the film, like Vera Drake herself, are working-class and unfailingly salt-of-the-earth. The audience is allowed no other response to these powerful performances. The single exceptions (apart from the wicked spiv who finds the girls) are the only two working-class characters who show any signs of aspiration or youth.

The young aspirational wife, Vera’s sister-in-law who wants to better herself, is a selfish monster. The only other person who turns away from poor Vera at her time of trial is her own young, faintly aspirational son who works in gents’ outfitting. Fortunately in his case (as he is decent Vera’s decent enough boy), the constant cup of tea soon brings him back down to his place amid the stoical, inarticulate, loveable working-class sorts who know their unaspirational place and have the right values.

By contrast to these working-class heroes and heroines, the upper-middle-class characters are all stereotypically heartless and repellent with mean spirits, locked jaws and nothing whatsoever to recommend them or to arouse any response in the viewer apart from contempt. The only exception (apart perhaps from a kindly society doctor) is a posh girl who is ignored and patronised by her chilly mother and date-raped by a Hooray Henry monster. She is therefore a victim and thereby relieved of much of her class guilt and no longer hateful, although still contemptibly repressed like all the other toffs.

One could say that there is nothing wrong with stereotypes in a work of art. Bourgeois realism is not compulsory in creative fiction. Think of fairy tales, morality tales, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. However, Leigh does not claim that excuse. In a recent interview he said: “Actually the last thing my characters are is stereotypes because they are far too idiosyncratic, like we all are, to be able to qualify in a million years as stereotypes.” Well, he said it.

If Leigh himself and his many admirers and his huge audience cannot see that his characters in Vera Drake are the most hog-whimperingly two-dimensional stereotypes, then there is something wrong with him and them and popular culture generally.

Alternatively (leaving aside Leigh’s personal baggage) it must be that the great British public, along with its supposed intellectual leaders, prefers easy, lazy, feelgood stereotypes to an artistic and intellectual challenge.

In many ways this film was wonderful. The direction is irresistibly lush and many of the images and sequences are unforgettable. There is something unmistakably authentic about all the period detail and the performances are quite impeccable.

For years we have been spoilt in this country with an astonishingly high standard of acting and every performance in this film is truly excellent. The many awards coming the way of this dazzling cast are thoroughly well deserved. However, intellectually speaking, the film reaches a depressing low in the lowest common denominator of contemporary British feelgood mindlessness.

The film’s tendentiousness, although perhaps not cynical, simply serves that uncritical feely-touchiness. Vera Drake is a back-street abortionist in 1950 whose only motive is to help girls in trouble and who is horribly shamed and punished for her kindness.

There is nothing wrong with that as a plausible plot. Of course there were greedy and heartless people who performed dangerous abortions only for money, but it is also true that some kind women wanted to protect pregnant girls from disgrace and misery and took terrible personal risks to do so.

However, this film presents such a sanitised version of amateur abortion that it is in effect powerful fodder for the anti-abortion lobby. A realistic portrayal of a back-street abortion would have been more artistically truthful and in the process made the case for legalising it.
Leigh claims to be interested in lies. Here he has effectively promoted several. The truth is that abortions like the ones so gently done by the saintly Vera would have been extremely painful and dangerous. It is unthinkable that there would have been no screams at the time and no horrible deaths and infections during her 20-year mission of mercy or that she would not have known.

The truth is that nobody taking such awful risks could have preserved Vera Drake’s relentless good cheer and confident respectability. The truth is that a hard-pressed, hard-up working-class family like hers could not have been so relentlessly saintly — no family could. The truth is that the interest of such a story lies in its complexity, of which this film almost entirely robs it.

A great artist would have risen above all this extreme oversimplification to tell wider, interesting truths. What Leigh offers is a combination of superficial nicey nicey, with a nasty underlying confirmation of outdated class prejudice. Shallow thinking and shallow feeling — that is popular culture in our time, it seems.

Something rotten in the state of Harry’s education

“A bad day for Eton” was the title of an unforgettable essay that I read many years ago, in a long defunct magazine, about the disappearance of Lord Lucan after he murdered his children’s nanny by mistake instead of his inconvenient wife.

The article described very eloquently the unpleasant world that Lucan inhabited, solemnly eating lamb cutlets daily in the Clermont club, giving upper-class countenance to flash gamblers and surrounded by a clique of rich Etonians and hangers-on, outstanding more than anything else for their philistinism, recklessness, ruthlessness and eye-stretchingly unfeeling sense of entitlement.

Perhaps they were all misrepresented but I rather doubt it. My own life has been punctuated often enough by meetings with such characters for me to believe that there really were quite a lot of them — and still are.
Like the writer of that article, I have often been tempted to think that this strange subculture might have something to do with Eton, rather as Harrow is distinguished by some particularly appalling chancers of a different stamp among its old boys.

Of course there are lots of old Etonians, young and old, who are entirely different and impressively well educated. I can even say that some of my best friends are old Etonians.

All the same, I have my doubts about Eton’s secluded oddities and I was reminded of that essay last week in the midst of the scandal surrounding Prince Harry. I feel as strongly as anybody else that what he did was almost unforgivably stupid and insensitive, particularly for someone in his position.

To most people the swastika that he chose to wear on his arm for fun stands for unspeakable atrocity and he should have known that. He should have felt that. The question is, why didn’t he? Why has nobody succeeded in teaching him what Jane Austen would have called proper feeling or, failing that, at least some political nous? It is obvious why his family has not done so. With the exception of his grandmother, his close relations are notoriously dysfunctional and tactless, if not actually unhinged, and live a life of unusual social exclusion and ineptitude, surrounded by disloyal servants demented by red carpet fever. It is also obvious — although extremely odd, considering how many films and documentaries there are about Nazism, the second world war and the Holocaust — that popular culture succeeds in teaching very little history.

According to a recent poll, about 60% of all women and of people under 35 know absolutely nothing about Auschwitz; the word is meaningless to them.

If ignorance is any excuse, perhaps a very young man could be forgiven for dressing up in Nazi costume. Most bog-standard comprehensives have for years been entirely unable to give their pupils any sense of history whatsoever.

Princes Harry and William, however, did not go to a bog-standard comprehensive. They went to Eton, one of the best schools in the country. It is awash with brilliant and attentive teachers — called by some other name, of course, because exclusive language is part of exclusivity. All those teachers must have been aware that in the princes they were taking on two troubled boys much in need of guidance — both real moral guidance and the more worldly sort to ease them comfortably into the Establishment and give them the acceptable face of privilege. This is the sort of guidance that schools such as Eton pride themselves on providing. I think Eton failed the princes, by any standards.

It may be, as people say, that Harry isn’t very bright (and would not have got into Eton had he not been the Queen’s grandson). But surely any responsible bill or pecker or beak at Eton ought to have been able to convey even to poor Harry just a little bit of history, the embarrassments of his family’s past and the painful ambiguities of his own role, not to mention some manners. It’s not molecular biology.

The privately educated boys to whom I’ve spoken (and they are not academic either) are powerfully aware of what a swastika means. They are contemptuous of Harry and also of William for not stopping his younger brother there and then in Cotswold Costumes in Nailsworth when he chose his Nazi outfit. Perhaps William was equally unenlightened.

It seems that the part of upper-class culture in which they find themselves is generally rather insensitive. It takes a distinct lack of proper feeling to hold a big party with a “native and colonial” theme (where a truly vicious guest took the notorious photograph of Harry). It seems that the princes are surrounded by young things, many of them Etonians, who just do not understand how distasteful their pranks appear to others.

I am not anti-elitist or invertedly snobbish or disapproving of titles or remotely politically correct, yet these sort of people have mildly offended me all my life with their insensitivity and their unconscious sense of entitlement. They bring to mind the rumbling of the tumbrils.

The Queen would have been absolutely incapable of such a disastrous mistake. She was strictly brought up to understand her role and to discipline herself to it. But her grandsons have not been properly prepared.

It may no longer be possible to prepare anyone for royal highness in a supposedly meritocratic world, where self-discipline is increasingly seen as pathological and there is only one elderly royal role model for it. Majesty is crumbling everywhere, from Holland to Japan, battered by neurotic brides and delinquent sons.

But without such preparation the House of Windsor is doomed to play out the next act of its lengthy Götterdämmerung at a rather more rapid rate, no matter how handsome William is.

However, if last Thursday (when the photograph appeared) was a bad day for Eton and a disastrous day for the royal family, it was an even lower moment for the world’s media. The nickname for my trade in Private Eye, the satirical magazine, is the Street of Shame. Last week we truly deserved it.
The hysterical international feeding frenzy, from tabloids to television, upon this poor boy’s gaffe was inexcusable. Millions of words and thousands of hours of air time, driven largely by greed and sanctimoniousness from left and right, were spent cynically teasing up profitable frissons of righteous indignation.

It’s well known, sadly, that swastikas sell stories and a combination of royalty and swastikas is commercial dynamite. It has been shameful and extremely unfeeling.

Poor Harry has been punished excessively. For a boy of 20 this international fury must have been deeply shocking. I believe that he meant no harm and I am sure that he understands now that he ought to be extremely sorry. He may apologise more.

However, a really grovelling apology is owed to the public, and even perhaps to Harry, from the entire population of the Street of Shame.

Moralists merely wail, but science gives us answers

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the philosopher Wittgenstein famously said. That was my response to the tsunami in Asia and its terrible aftermath.

To me it was and is a meaningless horror about which there is almost nothing one can say except, perhaps, to ask what can be done. Perhaps the most picturesque was the belief of Alun Anderson, editor-in-chief of New Scientist, that cockroaches are conscious. That is to say cockroaches and other quite simple animals are conscious of the world around them, though quite differently from humans, and not merely driven by hard-wired, instinctive, scuttling reactions.

That has not stopped thousands of people, particularly media commentators and public pontificators generally, from holding forth about it at length, trying to extract morals and meaning.
I am not complaining about all the reporters and scientists who have been trying to discover useful information about how the tsunami might have been anticipated, its effects mitigated, what can be done now or how relief work is being co-ordinated.

What has depressed me has been the excessive moral and theological posturing. Media atheists have been unfeelingly triumphalist, as if this disaster proved them — yet again — right in their disbelief.

And media men and women of the cloth have, not surprisingly, been reduced to incoherence about their enduring belief. The Archbishop of Canterbury became, and not for the first time in his episcopate, almost incomprehensible.

“The extraordinary fact,” he wrote, “is that belief has survived such tests again and again — not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them. They have learnt to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift.

“They have learnt to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God’s mercy for themselves and make it real for others and they have learnt that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.

“These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart.”

If that contorted prose means anything at all, it would take a very great leap of faith, of a most mystical sort, to believe so.

It is sad that the Church of England, which produced the strong-minded, eloquent lucidity of Cranmer’s liturgy, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of the English language, should now be reduced to impenetrable waffle.

However, in my case it would have made no difference if the archbishop had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels; I am an unbeliever. Yet the constant images of the disaster in Asia, like the less constant images of broken people and broken lives in Iraq, do naggingly demand some sort of answer to the question of what, if anything, one does believe in.

Confronted with senseless violence, viciousness, corruption high and low, and human weakness generally, it is hard to have faith in anything much, especially if one is not religious. But even so I do believe in the importance of faith — not of religious faith but of faith in a different sense, such as keeping faith or living in good faith.

This is not something I can particularly defend, although some evolutionary biologists have tried. It just seems good to me: I do, like religious people and most irreligious people (whatever they might think), have faith, which is to say I hold an irrational belief in some things that I can’t support with argument or evidence. As a believer in the supremacy of scientific thought (if only through a glass and rather darkly), I’ve always found this awkward.

However, it seems it doesn’t necessarily trouble real scientists. Great scientists have sometimes guessed the truth before they had either the evidence or arguments for it; Diderot called this the “esprit de divination”. And the online magazine Edge began the new year by asking 120 scientists “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” It received 60,000 words of fascinating reply.

Even more startling is the belief of Kenneth Ford, the distinguished American physicist, that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.

Then there is a heart-warmer from W Daniel Hillis, a physicist and computer scientist, admittedly with a background in the world of Disney. “I know it sounds corny,” he writes, “but I believe that people are getting better. In other words, I believe in moral progress . . . our species is passing through a transitional stage from being animals to being true humans”. In 10,000 years or so, he says, we will be much better and more altruistic.
Scientists don’t normally tend to be quite so astonishingly upbeat as that, but all the same, what distinguishes scientists is their ambitious, open-minded optimism.

Humanity may not make progress, but science certainly does, at a breathtaking rate in many fields, and this sense of increasing discovery and power makes scientists feel hopeful.

By contrast, non-scientific people who have studied and worked in the humanities tend to feel just the opposite — pessimistic, jaded and powerless. Perhaps that is because the human condition hasn’t changed much for the past couple of thousand years and there isn’t a great deal left to say about it.

This first struck me when I worked long ago in the BBC on two science programmes made by a brilliant young producer, one on gerontology and the other on the Big Bang. The producer had an extraordinarily positive quality about him that I had never come across before.

The reason, I began to realise as I listened to him and struggled to understand scientific journals and eminent scientists, was that in science things keep getting bigger, newer, better.

Science is where the intellectual story is. C P Snow wrote famously about a division between the two cultures of literary intellectuals and scientists and suggested a “third culture”, which might unite them.

That never quite emerged. What has happened in the past couple of decades has been that scientists have increasingly bypassed the rather supercilious arts intellectuals and seized the intellectual initiative and the intellectual high ground for themselves.

Many of them have written eloquent and readable books for the general reader, appearing in the mass media or contributing to intellectual online magazines such as Edge.

Scientists, increasingly, have become our public intellectuals, to whom we look for explanations and solutions. These may be partial and imperfect, but they are more satisfactory than the alternatives.

So here is what I believe, without being able to prove it. If there are any answers to life’s greatest questions, or if there are other questions that we should be asking instead, it is science that will provide them.