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As part of an investigation into the governance and financial management of Magdalen College School, I read online profiles of the Master, Helen Pike.

Why are all the articles about her so gushing? She’s a public figure making political decisions about the future of one of England’s most prestigious educational institutions.

They just publish advertorial for MCS. You’d think journalists would exercise some critical faculties.

They could at least make teasing comments about her Miranda Priestley sense of fashion, or tame jokes about her resemblance to Miss Honey in Roald Dahl’s Matilda or recherché references to the ‘Queen Semiramis’ of Cowley Place.

Anything!

In my article I had the temerity to suggest that far from building the school upon the rock, she had expanded it onto the sand. And now the rains are tumbling down.

I urged everyone associated with the school to reject Pike’s plan, which I argued, was to turn MCS into a secular, coeducational global franchise.

My alternative vision? I want the school to go back to educating the sons of Oxford’s professional classes as cheaply as possible, as it did in the C20th.

That’s a legitimate political intervention, isn’t it?

Why does nobody else want to stand up to her?

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It was a time of early September coolness like we’re experiencing at the moment.

46 years ago I faced the most dramatic transition of my life.

On a Monday evening of torrential rain, my father drove me from a three-bedroom house on an estate in a small village in Wiltshire to School House at Magdalen College School on Cowley Place by the Plain.

I was directed to a spartan dormitory with rows of cast iron beds with red bedspreads and starched white sheets. At the very end was one with my name on it. My life went from tranquilty to chaos with a matter of hours. After lights out, my new school chums welcomed me with insults and whacked me with pillows.

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Last night, patience paid off. My son’s school hosted a Sword in the Stone ceremony.

Since half-term I’ve been going in half a day a week to work with a class of primary school leavers to write speeches with them. They practised and got feedback from their fellow pupils. It was great when they could tell each other to speak more clearly, or identify ‘hyperbole’. They came up with their own ideas, but I sat down with them to give the presentations a three-part structure.

I wanted them to reveal their backgrounds, what languages they spoke and what countries their parents came from. I wanted them to tell stories about their lives – the dramas and the achievements so far. I wanted them to make pledges for their future. Continue Reading

Advances in medical science are not prolonging life, they are extending death.

That’s the bold and refreshing conclusion to Lucinda Holdforth’s barnstorming new book.

Furthermore, we have a medical model where, ‘ethical failure and moral cowardice meet economic self-interest.’

Holdforth is an Australian and her book is not available in the UK, but apart from some comments about compulsory voting, almost all of what she writes also applies here.

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I’m involved in setting up an Adam Curtis Party Conference.

Adam Curtis is a famous BBC television documentary maker. He creates quirky programmes about geopolitics and social change.

One of Curtis’s interests is political language. Ten years ago he made a film called Hypernormalisation. It’s about how the language of politics became corrupted in the old Soviet Union.

Nothing made any sense, but there was nothing you could do to change anything, so people just accepted the fake world and acted accordingly.

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Politics to me is that process of coming up with a worthwhile goal and persuading your fellow citizens to pursue that goal.

Do something!

Shut down the mines, regenerate the docklands, abolish the GLC.

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As a speechwriter, I have become interested in the study of rhetoric.

The study of rhetoric has been sidelined in education. Rhetoric makes a lot of people uncomfortable because you could call it the art of lying convincingly to bring about change. Or maybe a better way of putting it would be to say it’s the art of stirring up emotions that will motivate people to make change.

That which winds people up, is not necessarily that which is strictly true.

We want to believe that people are honest and decent in society. Many people probably feel uncomfortable with the idea that we are ‘performing creatures’.

Ever since the Reformation in Europe, we like to think we’re individuals. We can have our own authentic relationship with God. We don’t need to be saved by a corrupt priesthood.

We can be true to our conscience. It would be contemptible to be insincere and just spend our days ‘acting’ in order to get what we want out of others.

In May 2026, I went to a conference on rhetoric, organised for sixth formers, at the Leucorea in Wittenberg, Germany.

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As speechwriters we seek to write a speech that says the right thing, in the right way at the right time.

When I started reading this book, it articulated many things to me that I’d been thinking and feeling for a long time. My perceptions were crystallised.

Nicholas Tobias gave up the prissy life of being a student at Princeton and Oxford to be a soldier in probably the toughest corps in the world.

He’s a sensitive man who willingly enters a crude and brutal male environment.

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Between 1536 and 1540, the monasteries of England and Wales were dissolved.

What should the great political project for the remaining years of this decade be?

It should be a similar assault on universities in England and Wales.

The arguments for surpression are similar in both cases: corruption and social change.

The 16th century sage, Erasmus, condemned the monasteries for vice, fraud and contributing nothing to wider society.

I cite as evidence a recent planning application for ‘luxury student accommodation’ in my home town.

The student loan system created incentives for people to go to university for the wrong reasons and burdened graduates with crippling debts, inhibiting their ability to buy property and support their own families.

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I recently went into Poole library with poster for a local event. I did a recce. There was a large noticeboard where there were about 18 A4 posters on the wall. I took stock. Not one was time sensitive. They all dealt with NHS or BCP propaganda.

I took my poster to the desk and asked if they would put it up. She said they would consider it. I said I’d like it on the main noticeboard, she said she would ask.

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