Freed from 30 years of administration and endless meetings, after taking early retirement from the day job in 2000, I started a happy time in the Education Department at Oxford University as an honorary research fellow. With some teaching I was able to research, write and study the depressing antics of our political masters and their aides as they further degraded what could have been a fair democratic education system into what became an unfair and corrupted system. In a pointless gesture, I resigned my fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts when asked to pay £50 towards an academy school (I did rejoin later!). I served on yet another commission looking at the Future of Multiethnic Britain thatwas duly rubbished in the press (Parekh 2000), but I tried to help education along in a country where, after various postcolonial wars, there was not much of it. This was the independent republic of Somaliland, where as a Trustee of the African Education Trust I could help train teachers and skill disabled people (Tomlinson & Abdi 2003). On several occasions in the north of Somalia we had a bodyguard with an AK-47, although as most people welcomed any kind of education, there wasn’t much need for an assault weapon, and I was never sure if anyone wanted to kill a granny. I also spent eight years on the council of the University of Gloucestershire, including chairing their employment committee, which was a much more dangerous activity.

BEING TONY BLAIR WAS TOUGH

Reading his memoir, A Journey (Blair 2010), you have to feel sorry for Tony Blair. As a privately educated young man (Durham Choristers, Fettes College and St John's College, Oxford), his first love was Amanda, the only girl at Fettes, whose father was a judge at the European Court of Justice.