The Daily Novel

When I went into City University yesterday one of my friends told me over a pint in the Queen Boadecea, which is the nearest pub to your office on the main Northampton Square campus, and which you will pass on your short walk back home to the Vice-Chancellor’s house in Middleton Square, that your partner knew Islington very well. But he may not be up to date and this part of Islington has changed dramatically over the last twenty years.There is no better of explaining those changes than giving you a cameo picture of the recent history of this pub.

Twenty years ago it was still primarily a typical Islington working class pub, which had resisted gentifrication much longer than many of the pubs nearby. It was called the New Red Lion and the tenant was a bloke called Arthur. Many City University students patronised it, both at lunch times and in the evenings, Because it was the nearest pub, and strangely, sitting in lectures all day seems to give people as big a thirst as sweating all day in the blast furnaces.

For most of the time, the two disparate groups, co-habited the same space harmoniously, as they still do in many British pubs. But occasionally in the evenings, when closing time approached, there would be nasty incidents. A bit of punching or, worse, some drunk would knock the top off a bottle and start using it as a weapon.

Arthur, who was quite a short man, but whose shoulders were as broad as his height, would emerge from behind the bar, and within moments, the offending drunks were on the pavement outside.

Arthur was equally popular with the working class regulars and the students. He had a particular affection for the journalism students, because at one point in his varied career he had worked in the ‘print’. If they were still drinking away as the evening went on, he would make them some sandwiches (although the pub did not then serve food in the evenings), which they ate hungrily. And, those of them who engaged him in conversation would have learnt something first hand about contemporary history. He would tell them just how it was to be a paratrooper, pushed out of an aircraft over Suez in 1956. And he would tell them just what he thought of the then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.

The only lot Arthur was not popular with, were the brewery, who wanted him to tart the place up, so that he could pay their higher and higher tenancy charges. So they ousted Arthur when he was on the verge of bankruptcy, renamed it, The Bull, tarted it up, raised the beer prices, and introduced tasty but pricey food menus. The working classes found other drinking places. And the students, who actually spend more time in the lecture theatres, than the pubs, did not spend enough to support the open all day pubs of 21st century Britain.

So this year, there has been another relaunch as the Queen Boadecea, in a desparate bid to attract some of the local up-market office workers. It is not likely to succeed because several other ex-traditional pubs in the neighbourhood have been in the same game for years, and as I pass them, they don’t look very full.

So if you feel like a pint on the way home I suggest a slight detour to the Shakespeare, by Sadler’s Wells. Where you can can also grab a quick sandwich, which will not cost you an arm and a leg, if you want to take a rest from your round of public duties and end the day at the ballet. Additionally the Shakespeare has a blissfully quiet urban garden, where you can get some fresh air, wonderfully relaxing after the days you will be spending shut up in doors in meeting, after meeting, after meeting.

There is a well-established practice at City University of management talking to trade union branch representatives on campus to attempt to resolve any disagreements before they escalate. This includes policy and practice. It also includes personal cases where a member of staff feels unjustly treated.

Management and academic union reps used to meet regularly three times a year in a formal body called the Joint Negotiating Committee. This stopped meeting two or three years ago for reasons I do not fully understand. But why it fell into disuse does not matter. The important thing is that it is being revived and will meet later this term. So when Malcolm Gillies arrives in August there will, hopefully, already be a date in his diary for the autumn meeting.

The academic union was the Association of University Teachers (AUT), to which most teachers in the ‘old’ universities belong. Last June AUT merged with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), whose members mostly work for the former polytechnics, and further education colleges, which are the leaders in such areas as the training of school teachers. It also includes teachers in prisons.

Both unions, as you might expect from a bunch of university teachers, are as much concerned about academic freedom and standards as they are about pay and conditions of work. They oppose the new managerialism, whenever it threatens academic freedom or the effective teaching of the students.

The new union, University & College Lecturers’ Union (UCU) has just published the manifestos of the candidates for the General Secretary of the new union. AUT is the biggest union in higher education, but NATFHE has a much bigger overall membership. Whether the UCU leader is an AUT or NATFHE person is anyone’s guess. The membership may vote tribally. But it may not, because the two unions have been discussing a possible merger for well over ten years, and there have been many meetings between activists of the two unions at national and local level.

At City (and at most other universities) the academic union is much the biggest union on campus. But there is a well established practice of AUT reps meeting regularly with the reps of the unions for the technical, office staff and manual workers. So that the academic union also speaks out on behalf of the other unions.

Something needs to be said about personal cases. These has been in the increase nationally for many years, as more and more Vice Chancellors have been infected with the Thatcher and Blair belief in that private sector managers somehow know more about ‘management’ than public sector managers.

In many personal cases, both the ‘victim’ and the alleged ‘oppressor’, a head of department or a Dean, are quite often both in AUT. So the union is best placed to help to resolve such disputes without the spilling of too much blood.

I should declare my own personal position in these matters. I am a former President of AUT and was a union activist for many years. I am currently on the branch committee with the specific responsibility for equalities, which is concerned with such oppressed groups as women, ethnics, the disabled, the aged and gays.

On the latter, Malcolm Gillies, should know that the AUT was even more forward looking than City University. Last year they elected Steve Wharton as President, the first openly gay person to take the job in the history of the union. Steve has stayed on for an extra year as joint President to help with the work of harmonising the practices of the two constituent parts of UCU.

Wharton became active in AUT as a direct result of what he suffered himself when in his first job in 1994. He was openly gay and doing his research on gay activism, focusing on the LGBT (Lesbians, Gays, Bi-sexuals, and Transgenders). At the end of his probationary period his teaching contract was not renewed. When the decision went to Senate to be ratified, a petition was presented signed by all but two of his colleagues.. His third year students also got together and signed a unanimous letter of support. Wharton then went through an appeal process which took eight months.

He spent eight months not knowing whether his career was in ruins. When he did get re-instated he determined to give something back to the union which had supported him. He will have a further year as vice-president working to harmonise the different parts of UCU and turn it into an effective academic standards, academic freedom and decent pay for the workers.

According to Larry Elliott of The Guardian Gordon Brown is ready to embrace the bloggers of the world. He says Brown, who appeared on the panel with Rupert Murdock, says the days of decision making in smoke filled rooms are over. Politicians had to involve the public and recognise the importance of the internet.

“A few years ago the debate was about whether the media controlled politicians or whether politicians controlled the media.

“Now it is about how we are all responding to the explosive power of citizens, consumers and bloggers.”

I would like to think that the blogging community had ‘explosive power’. But I doubt. I think the big companies, who are well represented at the World Economic Forum, have quite a lot of power over the consumers. And I think the new internet millionaires, including companies like Technorati and Google have a big say in a big say in which blogs get read.

The big companies, including the old media companies, are in a much better position to learn the tricks of meeting the criteria established by the search engines. And they have the money and manpower to attract bigger audiences. The millions of individual bloggers cannot compete in terms of supplying information. They can express their views, opinions and feelings. But how they come to them is still largely dependent on the reports by the mainstream media.

The coolest party was given by Forbes Magazine, which represents old media money. And it is big money. Steve Forbes, the nephew of the man I used to work for, is and he can afford to give away $7 million to political parties.

City University has just appointed what I believe to be the first openly gay vice chancellor of any British university, Malcolm Gillies.  I was immensely pleased that my own university had done such a thing. But you would not know this if you had not read my blog earlier today. Because the mainstream media has not reported the news.

Why?

Because someone at City University cut it out of the press release.

What my full-time colleagues at City University received was an annoucement that their new vice chancellor was looking forward to coming here in August 2007, and that his partner, David… would be joining him.

This was too much for some minion at City University, who cut it out of the press relaase. Despite the fact, that the full Council of City University had appointed a gay Vice Chancellor, not because he was gay, but because they thought he was the best man (or woman) to run this rather small university, which has done some rather interesting things that Oxbridge has failed to do. Like for instance start a half-way decent Journalism department.

In between resolving a conflict between my dearly beloved grandchildren, Joe and Dulcie, who were interupting my work by attempting to scratch each other’s eyes out, I have been trying to check out this story. Which I have done to the best of my ability as a trained journalist.
It is not as easy as you imagine. Google does not help. But in the telephone calls I have made to people who would know about such things, they have agreed with me. There is no existing university boss who has declared himself as gay.

So I am posting.

But if I have got it wrong. I will correct. Immediately.

It still makes a difference being gay in Britain, 2007. You are in no danger of the police carting you off to Reading Gaol but the emotions that did for Oscar Wilde are still a part of the British psyche today. So once the tabloids get the story (which may not be for a long time because coverage of higher education is not one of their news priorities) you will be known as the gay Vice Chancellor. The tabloids won’t be writing about your Fourth Dimension thinking, that takes more and bigger words than the tabloids like to print.

As you will have read in the press there is quite a battle going on over the gay adoption bill currently before Parliament. The Roman Catholic Church is lobbying vigorously for an exemption to the new law which would require adoption agencies to consider gay couples. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have come out and declared themselves firmly behind Rome on this issue. The British cabinet is split, with Communities minister Ruth Kelly, who is a Roman Catholic, on their side. She is allegedly supported by the Prime Minister, who is a closet Roman Catholic. (The rumour is that once Tony Blair leaves office and starts writing his memoirs he is going to declare his allegiance to Rome.) . Today’s Guardian, relying on un-named Cabinet sources, asserts that the Prime Minister has now decided to go with the cabinet majority opinion.

So your appointment will greeted with mixed feelings by the faculty of City university, which despite the fact that we have masses of foreign students, is still dominantly British. And we probably have a few Catholics.

You can, however, rely on the support of the journalism department, which is an enthusiastic fighter against discrimination against all minorities. And I can tell you a story which may warm your heart.

Back in 1981, at the end of a long day of interviewing, a young Australian called Martin Portus, walked in to my office. We did our usual thing of making him feel comfortable and getting him to tell us all about himself and why he wanted to become a journalist. Martin told us that he was gay and how important it was for gays to declare themselves and work to reduce the discrimination against gays.

My co-interviewer, Eric Stadlen, could not contain himself. He stopped him in his tracks. And told him that if he had been before a BBC panel he would already have ruled himself out, although he would never be told the real reason. If he wanted to get into journalism he must realise that you should keep such things to yourself.

After Martin left the room Eric and I had a little discussion about whether to take him. Eric, who had spent all his life in the BBC, which all readers of the British tabloids know is full of gays and Marxists, had worked with many gays.. But his own personal position was not too far away from that of the Archbishops. (The Daily Mail was his favourite newspaper.)

The professional question we had to answer was whether the candidate had what it takes to be a good journalist. In Eric’s terms, that meant that you had to be capable of removing yourself from the picture and reporting ‘objectively’ on events. Above all you must not fall in to the trap of voicing your own opinions and feelings.

On most of our interviewing criteria Martin was an above average candidate. So the decision was not that difficult. Most of our best candidates had very strong personal opinions and feelings of their own, which they wanted to voice. Like Martin, they would have to learn that most of their potential employers did not share their hatred of Margaret Thatcher. So we took him. And he did OK. I just looked him up on Google. After several years working for Australian ABC TV, he is now Director of Public Affairs at the National Museum of Australia and a board member of the Sydney Star Observer and Currency Press.

And obviously he did not get where he is today by following my avuncular advice not to tell everyone he was gay the moment he met them. On the contrary he seems to have established himself as a prominent member of down under’s gay community.

In doing my Google search I found a play review by Martin of Singing the Lonely Heart. His first sentence is:

Alana Valentine’s plays strive to deliver some social insight, often with a queer perspective, but also to transport us with something theatrical and magical.

I have not heard that word used in Britain since I was in the school playground.

Perhaps that is one more thing I should tell my new Vice Chancellor, Malcolm Gillies. Gay’s the word. It is only aged oiks from Wolverhampton like myself who still talk about queers.

After all, you could not have Queer Pride, could you?

This blog introduces a series of ten ‘lectures’ to my new boss, an Australian called Malcolm Gillies, who has just been appointed Vice-Chancellor of City University, London. But before I start them I need to explain that I am not going to be telling him things he already knows from his reading and from his meetings with the City top brass during the procedures by which he was appointed. And I need to tell readers of this blog, many of whom may not care a damn about City University, that although I will be writing about a specific case, the isses affect all British universities. And they affect all universities, in that they deal with conflicting demands from, in the current jargon, the stakeholders. Which means the students, the parents who send and quite often support the students, the big companies who employ the students, and the governmenta and communtities which are affected by them.

So although these blogs will be about one of the smallest universities in Britain, situated on one of the least attractive campuses, over-shadowed by lofty council blocks, and with pubs peopled by people who knew the Adams gang who used to terrorise the neighbourhood, what City faces is what most universities face.
But in this introduction I have to let everyone know where I am coming from. These blogs intentionally reveal many of the things I did not write about as a journalist, or as a full-time member of City University’s staff. And, I do have some feelings about Australians.

First impressions have a long life.

My first impressions of Australians, long before I had any close Australian friends, date back to the 1950s. In those days, when you were thrown out of the pub at 11 pm and were still thirsty, the party went on in the house of someone who lived nearby. Some of those parties got out of hand. And I remember one vividly in a not very big house in a not very big bedsit. It suddenly exploded into a punch-up between the Australians and the Irish. A punch-up with weapons. I cannot remember whether it was an Australian or an Irishman who first broke the neck of the bottle and smashed it in an opponent’s face. As soon as the blood began to flow I fled to my own bedsit.

It is entirely possible that many of the Australians and the Irish who needed a drink after closing time, were somewhat oafish. But over the years I did meet other Australians (and also read Patrick White) who changed my first impressions. In the world of journalism I was impressed with both Philip Knightley and Bruce Page, part of the old Sunday Times team in Harry Evans’ day. They were the first two individuals that made me realise that Australians were not all hung up on the open air life and getting to the beach. They had extremely active minds. And not only that they had insights into the way us Brits behaved that we missed.

(Gillies be warned. Once here, they stayed for life. Although Knightley does manage to organise his work life so that he works in Australia for several months of the year.)

My vice-chancellor may be more interested in the Australian academics I have met who are a part of my prejudices about the Aussies. Two pop up in my mind immediately, both of whom I met in my time at the London Business School in the late 1970s.

John Hunt, who came in towards the end of my time there, was not my friend. Not because of his personal qualities, but because of the circumstances of his arrival. That story is one of the many untold scandals of academia, which journalists do not make a priority when deciding what to write about.

My boss at LBS was Innis Macbeath, a former Labour correspondent of The Times, who had been appointed to the new Plowden Chair of Industrial Relations. Macbeath came from a privedged background. His dad was a distinguished Scottish professor of philosophy. But Innis, who was blunt spoken and thickset in build (He looked like a trade union leader) got on better with the trade union leaders of his day, than most of his competitors in Fleet Street. At The Times in the early 1970’s he was an irritation to the management, because the powerful printing unions had elected him Imperial Father of the Federated Chapels. (In plain language the means he was the boss shop steward, a post hithetoo held by one of the printers). In the privacy of Printing House Square he argued their case. In his public writings he put forward the rational case for sorting out the problems of Fleet Street industrial relations by dialogue between the two opposing factions.

For the London Business School, right-wing and close to the big companies of the time, but also founded with several millions of public funds, he was a wonderful catch. The respectable face of the opposition and someone whose views were admired by the Plowden family which funded the chair.

As the 1970s went on, and the country moved rightwards, and the London Business School led the charge towards monetarism, Macbeath was more and more at odds with his bosses. His contract was not renewd and John Hunt was imported to fill the chair. It did not matter that he knew nothing about industrial relations. His specialism, organisational behaviour, could be presented as including industrial relations (it also includes philosophy, economics, psychology and sociology!). The name of the chair was changed retrospectively to the Plowden Chair of Organisational Behaviour, as you will see if you click on this link, because John Hunt is still associated with LBS as an emeritus professor.

The other Australian who sticks out in my mind is Denis Pym, because we shared similar views about the issues in organisations most people were avoiding. I have long since lost touch with him and have no idea where he is now. But if you click on this link you can get hold a book he wrote with colleagues in 1993, called The Theory and Philosophy of Organisations. It deals with understanding how the assumptions which scientists bring to their subject of investigation guide and influence what we do. Clearly it is the Denis Pym I knew. And the subject is even more relevant now than it was then.

I am not suggesting you read the books Macbeath wrote, which are dated. But click on this link. You will learn something about Amazon. You will find that after offering you Cloth Caps and After (1974), which was all based on Macbeath’s dealings with the workers’ leaders like Jack Jones, Arthur Scargill and Hugh Scanlon, Amazon recommends for like minded readers two books about cleaning cloths!

My debt to Innis arises from our personal friendship. He was one of those people who made me realise that my unusual mind (sometimes regarded as mad) had some positive qualities. Innis had an even more unusual mind. He was one of the estimated 1 per cent of human beings who have eidetic memory. If you follow the link to the Wikipedia entry, you will see that some people think eidetic memory is a myth.

I know they are wrong. Innis was an honest man, as well as a professional journalist, and I had no reason to disbelieve him when he told me that he remembered conversations because he saw them written on something like a television screen inside his head. He could remember conversations verbatim years afterwards. Which is one reason those trade union leaders were so enthralled. They had never met anyone like him before.

I had. One journalist whom I interviewed with jointly. He never took a note. He did not need to. Because he remembered all the quotes he needed.

This article has moved somewhat from the beginning. But I can easily connect backwards to my vice-chancellor, because Wikipedia alleges that his beloved Mozart may have had eidetic memory.

So my message is that human beings vary on all sorts of parameters. And they are all important. So, while we Brits have got over the notion that Australia is peopled by the convicts we sent there, and the current population is infected with their DNA, we do think the Aussies are a bit different.

But, because we are British, we never reveal such feelings.

Re my speculation yesterday on City University’s new Vice-Chancellor.

According to one of my colleagues he is a fan of Mozart. Co-incidentally the first theatre review I caused City University’s journalism students to write in 1980 was of the Peter Shaffer play, Amadeus. You will remember that the story line is the battle between the creative genius and Salieri, depicted as the conservative self-seeking bureaucrat.

As you can see from the Wikipedia article, Shaffer used his imagination to beef up the Sailieri character. But it was a rattling good play. So I choose to see it an omen for creative leadership at City U.

City University, London has just appointed a new vice-chancellor, Professor Malcolm Gillies, an Australian who is currently Vice President (Development) at the Australian National University. His current job is based on Yale University in the US because, according to the press release, he is responsible for finding ‘more diverse and international income sources.’ The press release also tells me that he was Pro-Vice Chancellor responsible for commercialisation at the University of Adelaide a few years ago. I groaned. Looks like we are in for another heavy dose of the new managerialism.

But I don’t intend to write him off before I meet him when he takes up post next August. There are other parts of his cv which suggest he might have quite different imperatives, and might even be in favour of what I call real education, rather the training academies for the high priests of American consumer capitalism favoured by both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

First, his original discipline was music and he was Dean of Music at the University of Queensland for seven years in the nineties. Second, and much more important, he made an impact on the Australian national scene as President for Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. He was also President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which is apparently one of Australia’s four learned societies.

A bit of googling made me feel almost optimistic. I immediately clicked on Thinking in Four Dimensions. This turned out to be a speech Gillies made about a book published in 2005 entitled Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance

The paragraph below summarises what Gillies thought about it.

Why is such research as found in Thinking in Four Dimensions so important? The book affords many answers:

because most people—most researchers—have difficulty in thinking even in three dimensions;

because this is truly ground-breaking research. Creativity and cognition are not necessarily natural bed-fellows. These studies do rattle at the cage of preconceptions in psychology, in dance, and, more broadly, in the creative arts;

because it lays—and has already laid—the basis to new approaches to creative work in dance, and, with that, creative new expectations of professional practice;

because this research is integral to the ever-needed renewal and challenges required of all creative arts, and of the creative industries. Through it, the health and diversity of the dance industry is better assured.

At last, I thought, City University has a boss who is on my wave length. It reminded me of the vigourous debates at London Business School, when I was part of the group which was challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that quantification was all. If it was worth researching it was measurable.

That orthodoxy still prevails today.

I got even more optimistic when I read a long speech Gillies made in 2005 entitled, RETHINKING AUSTRALIAN INNOVATION. It is a thoughtful speech, in which he deals insightfully with some of the tensions between the sciences, the arts and the social sciences. It is not easy to sum it up, but I have chosen these two paragraphs:

And we need social innovation, a growing field in Britain and the United States. Innovation that is not concerned with one bottom line, but concerned with three or four. What are the environmental consequences? What are the consequences for people? And what is the ethical bottom line?

And then there’s creative innovation. A wonderful area in which technology can assist us to create the content which most of us enjoy when we go to a film, when we play a computer game, when we listen to recorded music, when we plug in the headphones of our iPod. The technology is wonderful but I must say personally, I don’t sit there wowing at the technology. I sit there thinking: isn’t this a wonderful artistic product, a wonderful film, an enjoyable experience.

This kind of thinking is music to my ears, and to the ears of many of my colleagues in innovative areas at City University.

But, of course, Gillies has spent the last two years at Yale, which has never been my favourite American university. Too many conservatives. Too much devotion to the gospel of consumer capitalism and managerialism. So I cannot be at all certain about what Gillies will be preaching when he arrives in Northampton Square.

But I am inclined to optimism. The mind that wrote those words in 2005 was clearly not a sucker for the conventional wisdom.

Who knows, he might even listen to my colleagues, when they tell him that it is not a sensible use of their mostly innovative minds, to cause them to spend so much time filling in forms, to satisfy the new managers who have been eating away at the heart of the British university system.

My headline is the title of a debate I went to last night at the RSA, which is short for the Royal Society for the encouragement Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. It was a highly enjoyable evening. It is always a pleasure to visit the land of the great and the good in UK because they retain so many perks. Like a splendid house just off the Strand. And the clout to celebrate their 250^th anniversary with a party at Buckingham Palace. (Yes, the Queen was there, but whether you would have got a chance to shake her hand is questionable. There 8,000 guests.) You get the picture. Makes you feel you are almost a member of the elite yourself.

RSA also encourage a lot of things I am in favour of. Like innovation and creativity in industry. And good real education for education for as many as possible. They don’t follow the current fashion for regarding the students as ‘customers’. And way back in the nineteenth century they were part of the lobby which gave Britain its first ever Minister for Education.

They are, of course, totally bi-partizan. (And always have been. Karl Marx was a fellow). This year they are running a joint venture with David Cameron, the Conservative leader, doing all manner of very good things. But their recently appointed chief executive is a former top aide of Labour’s Tony Blair.

So did I learn anything new? Not exactly but some very good points were made and forcefully.

Nicola Horlick, did not pull her punches. Of course women were under-utilised. Otherwise 50 per cent of our company directors would be women. She stressed the need for a change in attitudes and said that women needed to have more self-confidence. And she should know. She was first lauded by the press as a superwoman, then crucified. See this story.

Supporting her, Jenny Watson, Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, argued that women have the competitive edge to take commanding roles. But most of them interrupt their career to care for children and find difficulty re-entering the work force. She pointed out that three quarters of women are in catering and caring jobs and that they also take most of the burden in caring for children and the increasing numbers of old people.

On the other side, top marks for ingenuity, go to the only man on the platform, Nick Isles of the Work Foundation. He looked at the world as a whole where millions of women are not only doing all the child-rearing, they are doing men’s work as well in the paddy fields. Top marks for humour, go to his supporter, Rachel Johnson, Sunday Times columnist and author, who said she had never met an under-utilised woman.

My daughter got the tickets, but she was experiencing the reality of trying to be a mother and a worker in London 2007. She had to go to the Midlands for the day, but the wind was blowing strongly here yesterday. Her train up was two hours late. And on the journey back she had to fight her way through the crowd that was laying siege to Birmingham New Street. This time the excuse was not leaves on the line, but trees on the line!

Maybe if there was a woman, like Nicola Horlick, in charge things would be different.

Ruth Kelley is relegated to the inside pages, but she will be even less pleased than she was yesterday when her Press Officer puts the cuttings on her desk.

The Sun has been talking to her constituency workers and thinks she is in danger of losing her seat. Here is the essence of the story.

MINISTER Ruth Kelly faces losing her seat as an MP in a backlash over her son’s private education.

The Communities Secretary’s decision to send her boy to a posh school has disgusted Labour members in her Lancashire constituency.

And it has damaged her hopes of being parachuted into a neighbouring safe seat before the next election.

Ms Kelly had hoped to move from marginal Bolton West — where her wafer-thin majority is under threat from the Tories — to Bolton South East, which has a rock-solid lead of 11,000.

But party workers angered by her “betrayal” of socialist principles have vowed to block the move.

Retiring Bolton South East MP Brian Iddon was said to be “bitterly dismayed” at her sending her dyslexic son to a £15,000-a-year boarding school in Oxfordshire.

The Times has an article by one of its leading columnists, Alice Miles, arguing that Kelly should have resigned her ministerial post. The 18 reader comments are split roughly half and half for and against what Miles wrote.

Taken together these two articles demonstrate that Murdoch papers do not always follow their master’s voice. According to everything I hear Murdoch is still very friendly towards Blair and he has, of course, sympathy with that rare species amongst the British ruling elite, the devout Christian.

More interesting is how Downing Street will react.

They will also have to take on board much the most devastating article on the subject by Simon Jenkins, in today’s Guardian. Jenkins makes the link between Kelly’s old job as Education Secretary with her present role as minister for communities. This is his final paragraph, which is the most elegant hatchet job I have seen so far this week.

Ruth Kelly’s freedom to decide about her children is absolute. Her wealth confers on her a choice that cannot realistically be extended to all. But she is also minister for “communities” who removed schools from local control and deluged them with central targets and directives. She told cities and counties that private financiers and management teams could run education better than they could. She destabilised every staff room and blighted every headteacher with bureaucracy. Now she parades as minister for “communities” while declaring her lack of faith in their chief institution. That is the real charge against her.

The Guardian headline writer summed it up well.

Introducing the minister of no faith in communities

What is even more interesting are the comments, of which there were about one hundred, when I looked at 2 PM. Some of them very long indeed. As far as I could guess from a quick read, they were equally balanced between praise and detailed arguments proving Jenkins to be writing rubbish. And not a few of the readers disclosed that they were sending their own children to private schools.

As those who read my blogs yesterday I think Kelly should have resigned. And so naturally I do not agree that this is a case of journalists hounding a minister. What it does show is that education is a hugely divisive issue. Not a few journalists have done the same as Kelly. But there are just as many have resisted that option, not because they were unwilling to pick up the financial burden, but because of a belief in supporting the state system, and a wish that their children be schooled where rich and poor kids were together, rather than places only open to the rich.