One of the most odious circumlocutions in English is the phrase “independent school” — which is really a way of masking the fact that the institution in question is a private school. Recently, it was revealed that a handful of Britain’s most expensive private schools (to wit Eton, harrow and Winchester) had been running what amounts to a cosy, price-fixing cartel. Zoe Williams has a nicely sardonic take on this…

In fact, that’s not the half of it, and the other half is a little bit dodgier – bursars of the above named schools were swapping fee information with one another. Not because they shared a trainspottery interest in numbers, nor because they were amused by the outlandish sums people were prepared to pay (though I’d be surprised if that didn’t raise a chuckle at the same time). No, this was purely professional, and also a little bit illegal. They were price-fixing, for which they have received a “slap on the wrist” from the Office of Fair Trading, though I can’t help thinking that the only metaphorical language they’ll really understand is a hefty thrashing with some kind of sports equipment.

More: John Clare, Education Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, takes a more charitable view.

How could such people [the establishment figures who are often trustees of big private schools] not have known that what they were doing was illegal? And who could believe they would have done what they did had they known it was illegal?

To the first question, the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents all the schools, thinks it has the answer.

As charities, the schools had always exchanged information about the fees they were proposing to set, and both the OFT and the Department for Trade and Industry failed in their duty to tell them that their long-standing immunity from competition law had been scrapped.

The second question may be rephrased as: “What on earth made the OFT think this particular nut was worth cracking with a pile-driver?” Did it really believe the spin some newspapers put on the story, which was that parents were being ruthlessly ripped off by a cabal of over-mighty schools not worthy of their charitable status and intent on stuffing their pockets with gold?

Thanks to Quentin for the Torygraph link.

Hilarious column by Marina Hyde…

Jack and Condoleezza – like When Harry Met Sally, only with more foreign policy.

I have no idea whether the foreign secretary finds his opposite number attractive (in my opinion, the spike-heeled-black-boots look is quite hot in a dominatrix-type way, and any guilt arising from a distaste for the politics would arguably make the fantasy more self-loathingly exciting). But it is Harry’s deliciously affectless theory that will be in my mind as Jack shows Condi a good time in Blackburn.

Indeed, the Beatrice-and-Benedict sparring has already begun. You’ll recall that the visit is a return fixture for Jack’s equally “extraordinary” and “highly unusual” trip to Condi’s birthplace in Birmingham, Alabama last year. At that time, a news correspondent described Mr Straw and Miss Rice as “laughing, joking and even completing each other’s lines – it really was as if they were old admirers, rather than two foreign secretaries trying to sort out the world”.

Photographed yesterday in a corridor of the LSE, an interesting institution in which eminent (if sometimes self-regarding) intellects labour in conditions of virtually unredeemed squalor. I was there to lecture law students on innovation, the Net and the music industry.

As far as I’m concerned, Lost, like the Peace of God, Passeth All Understanding. So I am grateful for this learned exegesis of the connection between it and The Third Policeman, and to Steve McGookin for pointing me to it.

Are you infuriated by companies which give you a recorded message saying “we really value your call” and then send you through a Kafkaesque maze for 20 minutes before putting you on hold in a queue? Well, here’s a terrific idea — a database which tells you the phone codes needed to bypass the maze. To cheat the Citibank system, for example, just key in the sequence 0#0#0#0#0#0#.

Unfortunately, the codes on this site are for US companies. We need one for the UK — urgently.

Update: Thanks to James Cridland for pointing out that there is already a UK page. Yippee! And to Harry Metcalfe for pointing out that, in many phone-maze systems, pressing the hash key will enable you to bypass the maze. Always worth trying, he says.

Larry Summers has resigned as President of Harvard, ahead of a no-confidence vote among the academic staff of the institution. In his Letter to the Harvard Community he writes:

I have notified the Harvard Corporation that I will resign as President of the University as of June 30, 2006. Working closely with all parts of the Harvard community, and especially with our remarkable students, has been one of the great joys of my professional life. However, I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard’s future. I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership.

Harvard’s greatness has always come from its ability to evolve as the world and its demands change – to educate and draw forth the energy of each successive generation in new and creative ways. Believing deeply that complacency is among the greatest risks facing Harvard, I have sought for the last five years to prod and challenge the University to reach for the most ambitious goals in creative ways. There surely have been times when I could have done this in wiser or more respectful ways. My sense of urgency has stemmed from my conviction that Harvard has a special ability to make a real difference in a world desperately in need of wisdom of all kinds.

The surprising thing is that he has lasted this long, given the complacency and political correctness of the Harvard humanities establishment. There’s a good analysis of his ‘mistakes’ in the NYT. Mistake No. 1 is “If the board says it wants you to ‘shake things up’ and ‘bring change,’ don’t believe them.” After taking sabbatical leave, Summers will return to Harvard as an ordinary prof. Well, as ordinary as he can manage anyway.

Alan Dershowitz, the celebrated law professor, is profoundly irritated by what’s happened. “A PLURALITY of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d’etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni”, he wrote in the Boston Globe.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers’s resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard’s diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers’s problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.

It’s worth noting that Summers was wildly popular with Harvard students, possibly because of his views that (i) the professorial community wasn’t terribly interested in providing Harvard’s student ‘customers’ (who pay upwards of $50,000 a year) with much in the way of ‘service’, and (ii) something should be done about that.

From today’s Independent Online…

In the event of all-out nuclear war, the BBC was to distract the nation by broadcasting a mix of music and light entertainment shows, secret papers released by the Home Office reveal.

Hundreds of security-vetted BBC staff and a select band of unnamed radio artistes were to be clandestinely dispatched to transmission sites across the country at the first signs of international tension.

Just before the first missiles had reached Britain, the BBC was to use regional centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol and Middlesbrough to broadcast a national service that the Government hoped would create “a diversion to relieve strain and stress”.

I’m reminded about the jokes that used to circulate in the 1960s and 1970s about “things to do during the four-minute warning” [that the UK population was supposed to get before the nukes detonated]. My favourite was “Buy A Renault 4 and watch it rust”.