24 Wednesday January 19 2022 | the times
Comment
going abroad again. What would I
remember now, after 70 years?
Even before entering the village I
remembered where my mother’s
rich friends lived (up a lane, over
the brook, and turn right) at
Newsham House. Reaching the
village (sweet, unchanged except
gentrified) I knew where the bus-stop
had been, recognised by its location
the church where they threw nuts at
Christmas, pointed out the doctor’s
house (his wife being my young
mother’s friend).
With my partner driving I could
direct him up the lane towards the
moor; knew where Arch House
(now Arch Cottage) would be
(on the left) — and there it was,
next to my friend Pamela
Braithwaite’s house. Are Audrey’s
family still next door? Her nice
mum ate orange peel and
had a squint. I could see my
bedroom, knew where the
stairs would be, and saw
the fields whither my
parents carried the
chemical lavatory to
empty it. “Up that lane,”
I said to Julian,
“there’s a T junction,
and Hill Top Farm will
face us.” And so it did.
On our way north
we’d passed Barnsley.
Here, aged three, I’d shut
a little girl’s finger in thedoor. Her house was on the left
going up a hill. The offending door
was in the downstairs front room, on
the back wall, to the right. Why are
these memories — geographical,
spatial, topographical — so clear
when almost everything else about
toddlerhood has gone? As I’ve
argued here before, I’m sure it’s
about language. Language lays down
memory, so before language it’s only
things like mental maps, which need
no words, that can be accessed. And
fears. I was afraid that little Barnsley
girl’s mother would be angry. I didn’t
care about the little girl. I just
wished she’d stop bawling.Mr Toad’s big leap
H
aving written about Boris
Johnson (again) on these
pages last Saturday I
resolved to say no to
radio and TV interviews
for fear of becoming a
bore. I kept to my
resolution for two
days, but for Newstalk
(Ireland) I cracked
because they’re so nice,
then felt I couldn’t say
no to RTE (Ireland),
after which BBC Radio
Foyle, after which I couldn’t
say no to Times Radio, then
BBC News. It’s a mercy I
was dropped by Newsnight
and World at One. ThatW
hen I was three the
A1 was called the
Great North Road
and getting from
London to our tiny,
freezing stone cottage in Newsham
in the Yorkshire North Riding took
all day in Dad’s little Austin. Aunts in
furry coats kept pulling me back to
cuddle me in the passenger seat,
when I wanted to sit forward and
see ahead. Now it’s just the A1; the
North Riding has been cancelled;
the aunts are dead; and in our
electric Mitsubishi we sped up a
motorway-type road in hours.
It was Saturday and we were on
our way to lunch in Yorkshire but
not as far north as Newsham, so
afterwards we continued, almost to
Co Durham, to revisit my toddler
haunts. My parents had emigrated to
South Africa after the Second World
War, but relented and returned with
one-year-old me. We were in
Newsham for three years before
As the West jaw-jaws Iran dreams of war-war
Tehran’s nuclear capability is growing fast but its missiles may turn out to be a bigger threat
have a longer range. “All US bases
and vessels within 2,000km are in
range of our missiles,” said a general
licensed to brag.
The fact is that you don’t need the
bomb to intimidate neighbours if you
choose your ballistic missile targets
carefully. During an exercise at the
end of last year Iran used missiles to
blast a life-size replica of Israel’s
Dimona nuclear compound. If Iran
can really hit the compound (deep in
the Negev desert) the effect could, in
terms of radiological damage, be as
devastating as a weapon of mass
destruction. Dimona is 25km west of
Jordan, 75km east of Egypt, 85km
south of Jerusalem. You don’t need a
nuclear bomb to destroy Israel’s own
nuclear programme.
The second ersatz version of
WMD is the use of drone swarming
techniques. If 100 drones are
combined as part of an integrated
airborne flotilla, they can form a
single collective weapon. Iran has
been training drone pilots, drawn
from the Houthi rebels of Yemen and
the Hezbollah, at a specialised air
base in Kashan. The latest success
notched up by Houthi drone
commanders was an attack this week
on the oil facilities of the United
Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi
airport. Israel has offered to share
intelligence on Iran’s evolving drone
tactics with the Emirates.
As long as Iran is led by a toxic
alliance of aggrieved religious
leaders and a corrupt revolutionary
guard with a brief to sow discord,
there’s no point in betting on
diplomatic negotiation or on a
rational path to reform. The regime
is ready to weaponise everything.assassination of Qasem Soleimani,
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards
commander, killed two years ago in a
US drone strike. He has become a
hallowed martyr, not least because
he was seen as close to the supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Mocked-up video footage
compiled by the regime recently
depicted a supposed Iranian drone
attack on Trump’s Florida residence,
Mar-a-Lago. The overwhelming
principle steering regime behaviour
is not an intellectual conviction
that diplomacy is always better
than war, or a feeling that all will be
well if the West can be duped into
lifting sanctions, but rather the
Islamic legal principle of qisas —
the equivalent of an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth.
Creating a nuclear bomb has
symbolic significance for Tehran, for
its ambitions to be a regional leader,
on an equal footing perhaps with
other members of the Shanghai
Co-operation Organisation such as
Russia, China and India. But to make
the final stride to becoming a
full-scale nuclear power — the tenth
in the world by some counts — to
even begin to approach the level of
menace of, say, North Korea, would
require at least another year of
massive deployment of resources.
Yes, it will soon be able to make a
bomb, but not a war-fighting arsenal.
What does it do in the meantime?
String Biden along for another 12
months? Build underground cities to
shield itself from pre-emptive strike?
It’s clear Iran likes the idea of other
kinds of devastating attack. The first
is its ballistic missile programme.
They have become more precise andT
his is the brazen age, the
age of the outrageous
ultimatum. Russia tells
Nato, impose guaranteed
limits on your eastward
expansion or we roll into Ukraine.
China tells Europe. Show us respect,
cancel Taiwan, or we will gum up the
supply chain to the EU. But it is Iran
that is making the most thuggish
proposal: accept us as a threshold
nuclear power with legitimate
ambitions to be a regional leader,
or we will spread chaos and blow
up your friends.
It would be reckless, then, to
ignore what the Tehran regime is up
to just because Russia and China are
competing for attention. In 2015,
when Iran signed up for curbs to its
nuclear programme in return for a
lifting of sanctions, it was deemed to
be about 12 months away from
breakout — the time needed to
produce enough enriched
weapons-grade uranium to make a
nuclear bomb. But by February last
year breakout was only three months
away. Now, US specialists say, it’s
about three weeks away.
The clock is ticking. “Iran appears
to be buying time under the cover of
continued diplomacy,” says Ali Vaez,
the Iran director of the International
Crisis Group. “Something’s got to
give.” Everyone blames Donald
Trump for Tehran’s rush towards
becoming a nuclear power. The Biden
people, the European signatories to
the Iran deal, Russia, China and
Tehran itself all claim that by walking
away from the agreement in 2018
Trump freed the bomb-makers from
all restraints in his quixotic support
for a broader, more robust
containment of the clerical regime.
But since signing up in 2015, Iran
has carried out several ballistic
missile tests, built new fortified
missile bunkers, withheld
information about its past nuclear
research, continued to search for
nuclear technology and waged a
shadow war against shipping in the
Gulf. Its participation in talks hasbeen at best spotty. President Biden
still hopes Iran will return to a
version of the 2015 accord by
February to coincide with the
anniversary of the 1979 founding
of the Islamic republic, but that’s a
vain hope. He wants to reassert
the primacy of diplomacy and
establish himself as the great global
convenor, but the past seven years
have shown Tehran to be an
untrustworthy partner.
The Iranians, under their new
president, Ebrahim Raisi, smell
weakness, especially since the rushed
western exit from Afghanistan. In
Biden, they see a president with no
fight. And they want comprehensive
revenge, in particular for Trump’sWhat drives the toxic
regime is the principle
of an eye for an eye
man is catnip to me. And the funny
thing is — though nobody believes
me — I like Boris.
Some of my best friends are
disreputable. I like Mr Toad in The
Wind in the Willows and would
much prefer an evening at Toad Hall
to one with Ratty or Mole. It’s just
that I wouldn’t dream of making
Mr Toad prime minister.The Red Meat’s gone off
H
ey, what a brilliant idea
Operation Red Meat (aka Save
Big Dog) is! How crafty to
distract media attention — and how
unlikely that anyone would spot the
ploy! And what great policy ideas
they’ve announced. Military to take
command of repelling asylum
seekers? Sailors on jet skis, maybe?
Or soldiers at artillery emplacements
along the cliffs of Dover.
Plus, “asylum seekers to Rwanda
and Ghana” is a master-stroke — we
could organise a one-in, one-out
swap with asylum seekers from
Rwanda and Ghana. As for stirring
up the BBC licence-fee controversy,
that’s sheer genius! Let the cry ring
out across the home counties: “Vote
Labour/Lib Dem and save the BBC.”Tuning in again
O
ops — that was BBC Radio
Scotland on the phone. Pre-
record at six? I heard myself
saying yes. There’s no hope for me.Matthew Parris Notebook
A visit home
turns the key
on memories
of childhood
Students’ personal
statements reveal
privilege, not ability
Lee Elliot Major
T
he personal statement is a
love letter from a university
applicant to their chosen
subject, an audition that
could determine whether
their academic dreams come true.
Applying for a degree place is one of
the biggest investment decisions they
will make, heaping pressure on the
hundreds of thousands of students
rushing to finalise their texts before
next week’s application deadline.
But the more I’ve scrutinised
statements, the more I’ve realised
they have become little more than
barometers of middle-class privilege,
and are no longer fit for purpose.
Many have become cynically
crafted sales products manufactured
by teams of unnamed advisers,
teachers and parents. My own
book, The Good Parent Educator,
has added to a vast amount of
literature offering tips — everything
from how to stand out from the
crowd and show off your academic
credentials to avoiding writing a
poor opening sentence.
The opportunity to sell yourself
in under 500 words (officially, under
4,000 characters) has been a
cornerstone of university admissions
for decades. But research reveals the
increasingly shaky foundations on
which it is based.
Teachers, for example, will urge
pupils to emphasise their
extracurricular accomplishments. Yet
most admissions tutors don’t give a
damn whether they’ve volunteered
for the local Cats Protection charity,
or won a Duke of Edinburgh’s award.
They want to hear about the
in-depth research produced by
applicants on their chosen subject.
More troubling is that they
contribute to an unlevel playing field.
Studies reveal a chasm in quality and
style between independent and state
school applicants. Private school
pupils are more likely to produce
well-written statements, free from
grammatical errors, while state
school pupils struggle to draw on
appealing work and life experiences.
A team at Ucas, the university
admissions service, has been tasked
with detecting plagiarism and
similarity in personal statements.
Unsurprisingly, the statements are
treated with varying levels of
scepticism by universities.
For all these reasons they should
be abandoned, or at the very least
replaced with a set of specific
questions. These might, for example,
ask about motivations for applying,
or any circumstances that may
have hindered academic study.
Universities should publish clear and
consistent criteria of what they are
looking for from candidates. I’m
afraid the time has come to abandon
the university love letter.Lee Elliot Major is professor of social
mobility at Exeter University. The Good
Parent Educator is published by John
Catt Educational LtdRoger
B oyes@rogerboyes