No one beats the English at dreaming up sports

“Rather a good mistress, but not a very good wife”

Annabel Goldsmith, who died last week aged 91, was immortalised by the Mayfair nightclub that bears her name, says The Times. Annabel’s was set up by her first husband Mark Birley, the handsome 6ft 5in son of the painter Oswald Birley, and quickly became the most fashionable club in the world, remaining a favoured haunt of the aristocracy and international jet set for decades. During the 1960s and 1970s, Birley often arrived home at breakfast time, and never considered fidelity a “high priority”. Reasonably enough, Lady Annabel soon struck up an affair of her own with the married business tycoon James Goldsmith, who later became her second husband.

Born Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart in Mayfair in 1934, she spent her childhood between various sprawling estates in Northern Ireland and County Durham, along with her grandparents’ Park Lane townhouse, which was known to “upstage Downing Street as a centre of political activity”. She had one of the “grandest coming-out balls of the debutante season” – the first event attended by Queen Elizabeth II after her father’s death – and later found a “surrogate daughter” in Princess Diana, who regularly confided in her about the collapse of her marriage to the then Prince Charles. Annabel had six children – three with Birley (one of whom, Robin, was almost mauled to death by a tigress at John Aspinall’s Howletts Zoo), and three with Goldsmith, including Jemima and Zac. When James began an affair shortly after their wedding – prompting his famous remark, “When you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy” – Lady Annabel conceded that “what goes around comes around”. She described herself in 1987 as “an incredible mother, rather a good mistress, but not a very good wife”.

The quiet decay of Britain’s parish churches is “happening under our noses”, says Alice Loxton in The Daily Telegraph. Just shy of 10% of the UK’s 38,500 churches have fallen into disuse in the past ten years; the Church of Scotland is planning to close up to 40% of its buildings; and Wales has lost a quarter of its historic chapels and churches since 2015. People may not appreciate it, but these are the “crown jewels of our heritage”. The Church of England has the UK’s largest collection of art, sculpture and stained glass, and cares for almost half the nation’s Grade I listed buildings. Free to visit and local to all, churches tell the stories not of the rich and famous but of ordinary people, and “how they have navigated the past 700 years”. And they’re vital social infrastructure, housing food banks, improving community spirit and offering a “rootedness” to our national story. We’d be foolish to allow our “soaring spires” to crumble.

The dumbing down of America’s schools

The past decade may be one of the worst in the history of American education, says Idrees Kahloon in The Atlantic. Around 33% of 13-year-olds now read at a “below basic” level – meaning they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or summarise its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Last year, the average score on a popular college admissions test was 19.4 out of 36, the lowest since the exam was redesigned in 1990. Understandably, people have been quick to blame this learning loss on smartphones, which became commonplace at almost exactly the same time that educational performance “crested”. But phones aren’t the only culprit. Another big, under-appreciated factor is that schools today simply expect far less from their students.

Roughly 40% of middle school teachers work in schools with unlimited resits and no repercussions for late coursework. Grade inflation is rife: the proportion of students awarded As in English rose from 48% in 2012 to 56% in 2022, despite their “demonstrated mastery of the subject” declining. But a few “outlier states” offer hope. Mississippi insists that all seven-year-olds pass a literacy exam before moving up a year, and sends literacy coaches into the lowest-performing schools. It’s working – from 2013 to 2024, it was one of only two states in which reading performance among nine-year-olds “meaningfully improved”. If you’re an underprivileged kid in America today, you’re better off being educated not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is half as high. It’s time other states – and nations – moved to replicate this “Mississippi miracle”.