Absolute Return for Kids

Although I don't see what goats have to do with the matter in hand.

He addressed the Conservative Party Conference this afternoon, so can Quddus Akinwale and his family now expect the ridicule, derision, intrusion, and general abuse that were last week heaped on the person and family of his fellow Sixth Former, Rory Weal? If not, why not?

After all, unlike Master Weal, Master Akinwale was not even a delegate speaking from the floor, but an invited platform speaker brought along by his Headmistress and so presumably subject to school rewards or sanctions based on what he did or did not say. What sort of party gives scheduled platform time to a callow youth, speaking specifically, not as an activist and delegate, but as a schoolboy? The sort that keeps Theresa May in the Cabinet, that's what sort of party.

I am sorry, and not a little disappointed, that even Peter Hitchens fell into the anti-Weal castigation of an adolescent for daring to express a political opinion. Hitchens is normally the most trenchant critic of his own generation's self-indulgence. Yet he indulged in what was really nothing other than a Baby Boomer's oozing of entitlement.

When the political parties were still mass membership organisations integrated into mainstream culture and society, as Hitchens would rightly like new ones to be, then activity in them from the mid-teens upwards was normal. Not universal, of course. But normal. Under those circumstances, how could it not have been? The demand to keep such activity reserved to the late middle-aged is a demand to keep it in the hands of those who are currently that age. And who, of all people, might they be?