I am not a prostitute and nothing I do is illegal.”I am endebted to fellow journalist Rod Liddle for pointing me in the direction of this story, which seems to conclude with Ms Dean lamenting that (in the words of the Gazette) “she was a single parent putting her daughter through school”. Her protests coincided with the publication in The Spectator magazine this week of an account of a conversation at a birthday party – somewhere in the sticks – between John Gibb and a woman also known as Jilly. Gibb’s Jilly was a middle-class fortyish countrywoman who, it transpired, was a prostitute. “I am a masseuse and therapist,” she told the paper, “with a qualification in counselling. Residents had complained to the newspaper, reporters had visited the flat, which was next door to the offices of a prestigious firm of architects, and the police had been called “Jilly” (a Ms Julienne Dean) was indignant. According to the local paper, the Western Gazette, the fuzz moved in on an address in the Dorset town of Shaftesbury (sic), just behind the Somerfield car park (I wonder it it’s pay and display), and very close to Gold Hill, where the Hovis advert was filmed. For the moment, however, sensuous tea may be off following a police raid.

For just £220 you can enjoy a “special happening” with the pair of them in the evening, and just in case you are after the authentic English experience, they throw in “sensuous tea in bed with Jilly” the next morning.
Well, they did. The actual fine detail of the strategies with their instructions to teachers may have been flawed from the beginning.It is not too late to make changes, build on what has already been achieved and make sure there are no further slippages in standards. Before the two strategies were put in place, the time allocated by different schools to the subjects varied greatly.The Government’s insistence on raising standards also led to a new cultural climate in our schools, whereby it was no longer acceptable for any teacher to claim, for instance, that poverty was an excuse for a child’s academic failure. But, in the same way as Mike Tomlinson described the introduction of the new A and AS-level regime as an “accident waiting to happen”, a similar charge may be levelled at the Government if urgent action is not taken to remedy the defects in the its literacy strategy highlighted in the Ofsted report.

Does that sound familiar? It should: one of the main criticisms levied by the former chief schools inspector Mike Tomlinson in his initial report on this summer’s A-level fiasco was that the new A2 units – taken in the second year of the sixth form – had also been introduced without first being tried out.Ministerial haste to launch education reforms in the early years of this Government was, it has to be admitted, understandable. One of the reasons, according to the Ofsted report, was the hastily brought in “guided reading” project pioneered in New Zealand and Australia under which groups of up to six children of a similar reading ability were taken aside by the teacher who listened to them reading while the rest of the class got on with other work.It was introduced in primary schools without a pilot scheme to test its benefits. However, yesterday’s report underlines the fact that progress in reading has not just stalled but slipped back for two successive years.There are worrying implications for the Government and parents alike in this. A firefighter’s or police officer’s salary goes much further in Lincoln than it does in London; it is strange that our unions find that such an obvious truth so difficult to cope with.. Tony Blair’s oft-repeated mantra that “education, education and education” were his top three priorities was never supposed to herald a fall in reading standards in primary schools four years after Labour swept to power in 1997. London prices are, on average, about 7 per cent more expensive than the national average; with services, on average, 13 per cent more expensive; and rented property about 50 per cent more costly. The teachers’ strike in London this week and the firefighters’ continuing action are the latest symptoms of a problem that has been too long neglected; how to recruit and retain public-service workers in a capital city where the average house price is now £250,000.
It is not a new issue, of course, and the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has tried to raise the profile of the problem, which, as any hospital manager or police recruitment officer will readily attest, is more acute than ever.

Max Hastings marched into Port Stanley at the head of a column of British troops. John Simpson went into Kabul with only a camera crew, several dozen excited children, a viewership in the millions and a city deserted by its defenders.
“It never occurred to me that other journalists would think that the greatest achievement in the BBC’s recent news history would be gall and wormwood,” he said yesterday on receiving an Emmy award for his transmission Absolutely. What need hath Evelyn Waugh to have written Scoop when the reality is so much more glorious than fiction?. It doesn’t quite match up to the relief of Mafeking in 1900 or even the attempted seizure of Baghdad in 1915 (actually, that failed with the loss of more than 50,000 lives – but we don’t like to dicuss it at the moment), but John Simpson’s liberation of Kabul stands there at least with the great British invasions of Afghanistan. He had earlier played a vital role in the inception of the Berkshire Boy Choir, in Massachusetts, and the Choir of the Community of Jesus, Cape Cod. But the majority of his time continued to be spent in his beloved Wales and in St John’s, and, lately, delighting in the company of his two young grandsons.