‘P aul Johnson has killed Gordon Brown.’ This news was
brought recently to Tessa Jowell, Anji Hunter, Margaret Jay and other Labour luminaries gathered in the Sabine hills near Rome. Shocked, they reached for their BlackBerries to find out more and make arrangements to fly home. Luckily, matters were quickly explained. After Mr Brown’s failure to call an election last October, Carla Powell, host of the above, named her pet rabbit after him. She possesses eight dogs, including a large, amiable stray called Tony Blair. Tony Blair never dared molest Gordon Brown. But six of Carla’s dogs are dachshunds, and the fiercest she named Paul Johnson, after this magazine’s distinguished columnist. Paul Johnson chose what Carla called ‘my pinkoes’ weekend’ to murder Gordon Brown the rabbit. And he has picked this weekend, when we and other non-pinkoes are staying, to exhume him. Poor rabbit, to be libelled by his name. His situation reminds me of a time when I asked a loader out shooting what it had been like to work for a certain landowner in Scotland. ‘Well,’ said the loader, ‘I would call him a pig, but that would be an insult to those noble creatures.’ Carla is (very) Italian, but is married to Charles, famous favourite former private secretary of Margaret Thatcher and brother to Jonathan, who did a similar service, as chief of staff, for the real Tony Blair. She has created an astonishing villa, looking out on one the ancient signal towers which used to guard the approach to the city. She claims that the tower features in a picture in the Vatican gallery, with the Sabine women being raped in the foreground. Spectator readers may remember that she wrote about the construction of her house in this magazine. Her way of living with her husband, she said, is like her vision of the European Union — co-operation, but not integration. The animals, however, are thoroughly integrated. She lives in a house separate from the villa and so do they, not only the dogs, but also four orphan kittens. When Carla returns from a grand dinner wearing an evening dress, she has to take it off in her car in order to prevent them climbing up it. In the hall of the villa is a photograph of Carla wearing a mantilla and being received by the present Pope, with the real Tony Blair standing beside them. Next to the picture is Benedict XVI’s latest book, Gesù di Nazaret. And next to that, laid out for the pleasure of the pinkoes, are the memoirs of the bulimic John Prescott. Sick Transit Gloria Mundi.
Charles and Carla organise a lunch for their guests, and an Italian former diplomat explains the Berlusconi phenomenon. In the great northern plain from which Berlusconi comes, he says, there is no historical experience of the state being an entity in its own right. Berlusconi thinks it is like a company, which he can take over and make private. A clever and waspish Benedictine monk offers an even more fundamental assessment of Italy. ‘You must understand,’ he says, ‘that this country was never Christianised. Only the symbols have changed.’ Both our children are leaving their schools this month. And so, before A-Level results come, either to bathe their time in a rosy hue or in the opposite, it seems a good moment to compare private education today with what my generation experienced. It is better today. Good private schools — in their case, Eton and Benenden — seem to have cracked the problem which beset earlier generations: how to maintain some sort of order without imposing pettifogging rules. I remember being told that I would become a heroin addict because I was not wearing cufflinks. That would not be said today (though, come to think of it, I now do wear cufflinks, and I am not a heroin addict). Public schools are humane places, and they have a greater degree of pastoral care, of sheer kindness, than they did. The intellectual sophistication of what is taught is high, and the efficiency of teaching is higher. The heads, in particular, now have the gifts of pedagogue, pastor, diplomat, politician and salesman rolled into one, whereas in the old days, you were lucky if they possessed even two of these qualities. Comforts, too, have improved: the places have become more like hotels and less like prisons. Of course you can still be unhappy at them, but nowadays it is no longer semi-compulsory. When you consider all the potential horrors of school life, we feel incredibly lucky to have been able to have our children educated in this way.
Has anything got worse in the public schools? I can think of only two things, one definite, the other only tentative. The definite is that the hand of the state casts a longer shadow. This applies to small things — fire regulations, for example, now forbid the eccentric decoration of pupils’ rooms. It applies also to bigger things. The summer term — its length, its ease, its mythical, golden quality has been undermined by the insistence, complication, earliness and frequency of public exams. These exams have become so all-consuming that they have made it much harder for pupils to prepare for university. Mental processes have become industrial, whereas they should be horticultural. This is absolutely not the fault of the great schools — though I am not sure they have always quite worked out how best to guide pupils through the maze of university admission. It is the fault of governments of both parties, and of this present government most of all.
The other, less definable unease I feel is to do with our culture of market forces. Of course parental choice is good, but it should not give rise to the idea that the parent is always right. Many misery memoirs have been written about cold, neglectful parents who packed their children off to boarding schools and forgot about them. The memoirs of the current generation will more likely attack the over-involved parent — forever emailing and telephoning children and teachers, chippy about any criticism of their child, unreconciled to disappointment of any kind. The need to respond politely to these people and pretend that all ugly ducklings are swans has made teachers more fearful. I long for old-fashioned reports which say things like ‘This boy is stupid, dirty and dishonest’, rather than ones which talk about ‘challenges’ and ‘issues’. I notice that it has become harder for teachers to be the slightly mad, mildly paedophilic, lonely, clever people who often taught best. Public schools have come more to resemble ‘normal life’. This is not an unmixed blessing.
In almost his last week, our son rang home and said, ‘Dad, what is a Hoorah Henry?’ I replied pedantically that he meant ‘Hooray Henry’, and tried to enlighten him, but he seemed puzzled. It spoke well for a modern public school that he could get through five years there without consciously meeting a single specimen.
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