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So, then, the three themes laid out on today’s wonky stall are gambling, pubs, and Oxford, and I am flogging them as a package: what is up for grabs is nothing less than Olde Englande, and
I rather fear that when Newe Laboure has finished grabbing it, there will be a whole lot less.

Half a century ago, Britain’s gambling culture was a bit special: it was remarkably animated, relying not only on runners, but on duckers and divers, and bobbers and weavers. If you wanted
to bet on horses or dogs, the only legitimate way was to go to the track, but if you wanted to bet on them anywhere else, or on anything else, there was no legitimate way at all. You had to descend
quite literally into an underworld of basement spielers, where dodgy entrepreneurs had paid off dodgier coppers to turn a blind eye while cards were riffled and wheels spun and dice tossed, and
wads of cash slid from hand to hand, usually in one direction only.

It wasn’t an evil world, just a bit naughty, a bit wicked, a bit, well, gamey – and very hard to find. It didn’t get evil until gambling was legitimised, when it became very
easy to find: it may always have been a mug’s game, but now everyone, effortlessly, could be a mug. Worse yet, it all grew, though I lack the space to explain in detail how, less British; and
now, under the crackpot croupiership of New Labour, it is about to become not British at all. It is to be Las Vegan.

The pub isn’t going to be Las Vegan, though: it is going to be continental. I’m not entirely certain what the Prime Minister thinks he means by that – does he envisage us
sitting around toasting Derrida in pastis to the sound of accordions, does he expect us to link arms and chorus our ambitions for the Sudetenland, are we to slump beside our umpteenth vodka,
weeping for our dead babushka, or, having sluiced down our ploughman’s taramasalata with our umpteenth ouzo, smash the plate? – but whatever he thinks he wants from 24-hour drinking,
what he is not going to get is ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ as the tea-towels drop over the pumps while the last ha’penny is shoved, and softly belching grown-ups toddle out into
the earlyish night, less plastered than is required for vomiting into a letter-box before chucking a gravel bin through Dixon’s window and butting an OAP.

You will, I imagine, have spotted that I am not merely wailing objectively on behalf of all the babies whose own drowning cries cannot be heard over the Government’s disappearing
bathwater: and since you have detected just a smidgeon of value judgment in today’s farrago, you will not be surprised to learn where I stand on the news that, because of the
Government’s annual underfunding of £100m, Oxford University is to cut the number of British undergraduates it admits and ‘vigorously recruit’ more foreign students, who pay
the full whack for their degrees.

Yes, where I stand is four-square behind the Department of Education, punching the air; because its stinginess will ensure that Oxford does
not
go down the cultural drain. Filling the
place with foreigners is the surest way of preserving it: walk down any Oxford street, and the flannelled fool pedalling towards you on an old Rudge bicycle with an oar on one gowned shoulder, a
teddy bear on the other, and a copy of
Zuleika Dobson
tucked under the leather-elbowed arm of his college-badged blazer is bound to be from either Minneapolis or Tokyo; where he has always
dreamed of dreaming spires.

And now he is cycling to the Bodleian Library, to find out what a crumpet is, and how to prong it.

C
ULTURE
stalwarts have been plunged into gloom at the news that many London theatres are about to go, literally, dark,
after an unprecedented loss of audiences; and since the Society of London Theatre is at a loss to understand the loss, let me explain it.

For the fact is that, while it will be agreed that a night at a great London theatre is a wonderfully enriching experience, more and more people are discovering that, with a little effort, they
can replicate that experience without actually coughing up £40 a head. Mrs Coren and I certainly have.

It is Friday night. After an enervating week, we feel we owe ourselves the tonic treat of
The West Wing, Friends
, and
The Simpsons
. Like the theatre, it starts at 7.45, too
early to eat before, so we shall eat after. We leave the house in good time, and park as far away as possible, allowing us to arrive back at the house, breathless and rainsoaked, just in time to
take our seats. My chair, such is the fortuitous construction of our living-room, has been placed behind a pillar; Mrs Coren’s chair is behind mine. In order to see either half of the screen,
I have to lean first to the left, then to the right, as of course does Mrs Coren, alternatively. From time to time she will strike me on the shoulder and remind me that some people have come here
to see the telly. I whip round and tell her that if that’s the case, she should stop repeating the actor’s lines, because it prevents me from hearing the next ones. She retaliates by
opening a two kilo box of Maltesers.

At the end of
The West Wing
, rush to the lavatory, only to find she has beaten me to it. I queue. By the time I get back,
Friends
has started, and she won’t let me take
my seat. I have to stand at the back, whence the screen is so small, it could be ping-pong from Beijing. At the commercial break, Mrs Coren runs out into the downpouring street to smoke a fag, but
the break is brief; this time, I make her stand at the back. But I do not enjoy the second half, for I have fetched myself an ice cream, and the little spoon has broken off in the tub and flicked
raspberry ripple onto my trousers. I move about so much in trying to rub it off that Mrs Coren calls the manager. Since it is my turn to be the manager, I tell myself to sit still or leave.

Before
The Simpsons
starts, there is time for a gin and tonic. Or would be, if the woman in front of me weren’t ordering a brown sherry, a Guinness, a dry martini, a San
Pellegrino, three packets of low-calorie pork scratchings, and can she have a tray? When I get back, ginless, the woman is sitting in my seat. I do not make a fuss, because it is her turn to be the
manager, and she will throw me out.

At the end of
The Simpsons
, we go to the hall cupboard to get our coats, but they have vanished, and by the time we get downstairs to the kitchen, it is too late for a hot dinner. Mrs
Coren asks me if I can run to a sandwich, but I tell her (in Polish) that the cook has gone home, and I am not allowed, under the terms of my temporary visa, to prepare food. So we go out into what
is now sleet to collect the car, which has, of course, been (a) clamped, (b) towed, or/and (c) trashed. Luckily, there are no cabs and the last bus has gone, allowing us to walk home shouting at
one another. It has been a magical evening. It has been what theatre is all about.

I
was much moved at our great Prime Minister’s personal intervention in the furore over unsatisfactory school dinners: not only did it stand
in a great British tradition, it took me back . . .

Deer Mr Cherchill:

Yesday we had Rusian sallad again. It was the thurd time this weak. The thing with Rusian sallad is it looks like sombody else has alredy et it. Nobody on mi tabel tuched it,
not even Gerald Bottley, who eets wurms. We all want to fite for you wen we gro up, but if we do not eet, we will not gro up at all, our feet wil not reech tank pedals, we will be too week to pul
triggars, wen we jump out on parashoots we will be too lite and get blone all over the plase. You will hav to do somthing. PS, wel done at Allermane, pleese congrachlate all conserned, yores A.
Coren, 4b.

Dear Master Coren:

Russian salad is very good for you. That is why your Uncle Joe is enjoying such formidable success at Stalingrad, where, subsisting as they do entirely on sauerkraut, the
enfeebled Narzis (sic) are about to be annihilated. My advice to you is to eat with your eyes shut, and make believe: you must say to 4b, ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our dinner and
so stuff ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and its Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say ‘That was the finest steak.’ Yours etc, WC

Dear Mr Cherchill:

Thank you for yore lettar. We dint half larf, do they reely call you WC, it must get on yore nurves, they call me Acorn, it is not too bad, Gerald Bottley is call Bummole, and I
wunt like to tell you about Brian Cunliffe. I am not suprised the Narzis are sic, we had sourkrout yesday, even with yore eyes shut it was like string in vinniger. Why can’t we ever hav meat?
They give us this sort of red lino and they say it is prest beef, but they are Hers, posibly Germen spies with orders to kill us by choaking. Good werk in Casablanca, by the way, did Mr Roosevelt
give you eny chewing-gumm? Wot we wuld reely like is some chicken. Culd you fix that? For yore infmation, I am not the master. Our Master is Old Farty. Yores A. Coren (boy)

Dear Master Coren:

Some chicken? I must say, you have some neck: none of us will have chicken until Hitler is defeated, upon which joyous day we shall eat it on the beaches, we shall eat it on the
landing grounds, we shall eat it in the fields and in the streets, we shall eat it in the hills, we shall never stop eating it; but for the present, I must urge you to persevere with the pressed
beef of old England. I also advise you to do the same with your studies: I cannot but observe that you are presently writing the sort of English up with which I will not put.

Yours etc, Churchill

Dear Cherchill:

It is not my fawlt my riting is rottan, it is on acount of my diet. If yu do not get propper food yu canot constrate, also bad behaviar, we do not play hoo can widdel ferthest
up the jim wall becos we want to, we do not flik blodge bullits or speke wen we are not spoke to or shuv 4a’s heds down bogs becos we like it, we cannot help ourselves due to eeting rubish.
Eg, yesday we had frogsporn, and no, befor yu say it, not tapioca, Bummole had a reel tadpoal in his, he sed wot the fuk is this, and Old Farty clowted him. By the way, wot is soft underbelly? I
saw yu menshunned it in Old Farty’s newspaper when he rolled it up as a weppon for Bummole’s hed. My mum says yu get it on pork, but yu hav to sleep with the butcher. I am at a loss to
understand, probly due to diet againe. Well dun about D-Day, tho.

Yours, A. Coren

Dear Coren:

Thank you. Yes, the war is indeed advancing rather well, and thus it may well be that this great island race will soon be facing a general election. I wonder, as a reward for
her exemplary moral integrity, would your dear mother accept my personal gift of a nice York ham? I am also taking the liberty of instructing your school to put extra sultanas in the spotted dick.
With more custard. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Most sincerely, Winston

Y
OU
will have seen at the weekend that a Yates’s Wine Lodge in Nottingham, deeply concerned about the grim
consequences of binge-drinking – riots, fights, vandalism, breakages, raids, and the myriad other appalling anti-social manifestations which, unchecked, can seriously threaten the profits of
binge-drinking – and finding its own bouncers unequal to the Cerberean task, has hit on the idea of paying members of the Nottinghamshire Constabulary to police their premises on a private
basis.

Not surprisingly, especially in a city whose law so recently had its knuckles rapped for being on the ends of unacceptably short arms, a public furore has followed. Among the outraged civic
clamour, however, you will not hear my voice, but this has nothing to do with my living miles from the Nottingham earshot; what it has everything to do with is my conviction that it is time this
benighted country introduced a system by which rich people in need of law and order could go privately.

Because it is self-evident that the more property you have, the more you will lose to villains eager to nick it off you; ergo, the broader should be your rights when endeavouring to thwart them.
It is preposterous that a multimillionaire whose drum has just been turned over should have to stand in line for a 999 visit, a CID investigation, the minimal chance of an arrest and the remoter
one of a conviction, as if he were of no more significance than some decrepit old biddy who had been mugged for her derisorily titchy pension.

More even than this, the well-heeled should not have to wait for the crime to be committed to enjoy the full protection the bank-balance allows: they should be able to ring a special number
whenever, say, they intend visiting a cashpoint, or walking to the pillar box with an important letter, or going out for the evening wearing a diamond choker/platinum Rolex/other fine bling, and
having to park the Bentley in some dark alley; at the call, two senior and fully tooled-up policemen would arrive immediately, one to accompany them, and the other to squat in their vacated
premises.

You will say, hang on, the rich can already hire private security men to do this, but that is not the same thing at all: partly because private security men are not empowered to arrest, partly
because they cannot even adequately confront, given that they are not permitted to carry weapons, but mainly because most of them have either recently come out of Parkhurst themselves, or know a
gang who have. Nor would they be any use if a rich man’s cat went missing, or the people next door were pledging their troth too noisily, or there was something about the relief milkman which
struck the rich man as iffy. If any such cloud were to appear on the rich man’s horizon, he should be able to ring Scotland Yard, bark a credit card number, and be moved instantly to the head
of the Pending Inquiries waiting-list.

I would go further: even when an arrest is made, it is often the case these days that an inept judge, flash lawyers, inexpert witnesses, and a thick jury will let the criminal off, accepting his
defence that he found your Modigliani in a skip, or was simply performing a generous deed because your wife’s tiara appeared to be uncomfortably entangled in her hair. Clearly, this outcome
is totally unacceptable: if you are in the fortunate position of being able to afford it, you should be allowed to hire your own private judge and jury, so that the man your own private policeman
has arrested will be found guilty as charged, manacled as painfully as possible, and sent down for the term you have specified on your order form. Or, in really irritating cases, hanged by you
personally: since there is no capital punishment, you would not of course be allowed to hang him by the neck until he was dead, but he could dangle for a bit, certainly until it put the roses in
his cheeks.