For God's sake, grow up!  R W Johnson, an Oxford don for 26
years, explains why he left England: to get away from the
national  Reading from afar about the furore generated by the
Laura Spence affair fills me with relief that I left England
five years ago and don't have to endure any more of these bogus
spats over class. The facts hardly matter on such occasions -
really, it's a sort of ritualised quadrille that the English
like to go through, full of rehearsed self-righteousness,
rehearsed indignation and rehearsed recrimination. But since I
was a tutor at Magdalen College for 26 years, I am in a good
position to know how grotesque the initial row was. John Stein,
the college's senior medic, is a man of progressive views and,
despite being a Wykehamist, of warm human feeling. He was always
to the fore in trying to increase the number of comprehensive
pupils in his intake. Indeed, Stein and I once went on a sort of
pilgrimage round the comprehensives of Dagenham and Barking,
speaking to endless meetings of pu