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The knighthood for Salman Rushdie means that he joins the same order of chivalry as Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the former head of the Muslim Council of Britain, who first came to prominence in Britain when he called for Rushdie’s death over his authorship of The Satanic Verses. Surely no knight of our multicultural round table should wish one of their number dead. If Sir Iqbal is consistent with his nasty principles, he will resign his title.
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Independent schools are taking a calm attitude to the new ‘public benefit’ test by which their charitable status depends on the work they are seen to do for the wider community. They believe that most of what is required is what they want to do anyway, and that they can establish good relations with the enforcers. This is probably the right strategy, but the test is worrying for at least two reasons. One is that, by saddling schools with new costs, it makes it even harder for new entrants. Well-established schools can afford these add-ons. The cut-price academies which could do so much to help poorer parents seeking a good education cannot. Even worse is the principle itself. It is an excellent thing to try to serve the whole community, but the chief purpose of education must be education. Until now, it is the educational purpose of independent schools which has given them their charitable status: if that purpose no longer has that effect, then the purpose will eventually alter to conform to the new reality. Education will suffer.
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Headlines about badger culls to prevent TB in cattle, and counter-headlines about how the cull won’t happen after all, occur every year. The debate never seems to change. I do not know the science, but it is strange how people think that, because they are fond of a particular animal, it should not be culled. Animals without natural predators usually suffer if their numbers are unchecked. So, of course, do the creatures they prey on. Might the decline of hedgehogs, which round us at least is marked, have something to do with the glut of badgers?
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Nothing brightens the hard road of the weekly columnist more than the occasional fan letter, but I have never received one as intoxicating as the following, which arrived last week. It says, in its entirety, ‘You will be pleased to see that scientific thinking is now moving towards you and away from Einstein’s hopeless model of the universe.’ Enclosed is material about spiritualism — in which I do not believe.
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Bromo (see these Notes for several weeks now) clearly had a profound effect on the English imagination for two or three generations. A friend reminds me of two letters from Evelyn Waugh. The first, to Mary Lygon in 1935, describes his early impressions of his future wife, Laura Herbert: ‘What is she like? Well fair, very pretty, plays peggoty beautifully. She has rather a long thin nose and skin as thin as Bromo and she is very thin and might be dying of consumption to look at her…’ . Writing to Diana Cooper from New York in 1948, Waugh boasts that he can get caviar there and Oxford marmalade, but ‘Not Bromo. I traced the head of the firm who made it, Diamond Mills. It was made only for English use and will never now be made again. He was very funny about the despairing fanmail he gets.’ I have been guilty of Bromophobia. For those who knew it, the paper represents a land of lost content, destroyed by war and social change.
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