Still unfair for bright and poor

What do we mean by fair when we talk about university admissions? The Prime Minister says he wants students let in purely "on merit". What do we mean by merit? Our papers are screaming with stories of high-flying candidates from independent schools who have been rejected by places such as Bristol in favour of kids with worse grades from comprehensives. "Social engineering!", cry the wounded parties. "It's not fair." Not fair for whom?

The Daily Telegraph columnist Tom Utley wrote recently about how his son had been rejected by a Cambridge college. It was the college Utley had been to and his father before him.

Utley Snr admitted that he may have got into Cambridge because of his father. Now Utley Jnr had been turned down, though he was a more gifted pupil than dad had ever been.

Utley Jnr missed out, but Utley Snr secured a place.

A place he may have denied to a bright working-class boy with a dad no one had heard of. Which is more unfair? Do privileged people feel unfairness more than people from backgrounds where unfairness is the name of the street where they live?

I can't help noticing that Tories, who are passionate about the free market, are happy to see restrictive practices operate when it comes to their own children.

Last year, Rolls-Royce School sent 18 pupils to Oxford and Cambridge. Rolls-Royce is a glorious purring machine of educational excellence with wonderful facilities and superb teachers. It teaches the brilliant to dazzle and the above-average to shine.

That's what the parents pay for. But do we seriously believe that every single student admitted from Rolls-Royce to Oxbridge was better, more deserving of a place, than the kid who came top of her class at Ford Fiesta Comp, which last year sent no pupils to a top university? Getting three As at Rolls-Royce is a cinch in second gear; two As at Ford Fiesta is a stretch in top. Like Rolls-Royce, Ford Fiesta has its high-flyers. Only someone forgot to give them wings.

Friends who have been educated privately tell the same story. In their year at school, maybe 10 pupils got into Oxbridge. Were they all brilliant? No. The top two or three were exceptional, the next three were talented, the bottom four were the type who make eager use of the highlighter pen.

The parents of the highlighters bought their places at the best universities, as surely as if they had turned up at the Bristol admissions office with a sack of used fivers.

There's nothing wrong with this, it's an act of loving responsibility, and we all want to look after our own. But private virtue, by a sad irony, can lead to a public vice.

In the US, they use SATS intelligence tests for university admission. But researchers have found these tests are unreliable because they do not factor in drive and ambition. The only reliable indicator of performance is the oldest one in the book: did the kid come top of his or her class? In Britain, a study shows that, once they get to university, the bright sparks from Ford Fiesta out-perform the highlighters from Rolls Royce.

Peter Wilby, the mischievous editor of the New Statesman, once suggested that every school in the country should be allocated two or three places at our best universities. These would go to the pupils who were top of their class. Overnight, a new and disturbing kind of fairness would break out all over Britain.

But it's not going to happen, is it? Why? Because social engineering is done by the driver of the Rolls-Royce. Not the Ford Fiesta.

Born to be unhappy

History repeats itself. It doesn't seem long since we were looking at pictures of Christina Onassis, one of the richest and luckiest women in the world yet seemingly slumped under the burden of not being attractive enough.

It was a good joke of God's to give Christina her father's money - and her father's figure. Christina died at the age of 39 after fighting the flab all her life and losing the battle to keep her pretty husband, Thierry.

Now the daughter of that union, Athina, has had liposuction to remove excess fat from her bottom. Apparently her Brazilian boyfriend Doda Miranda, who sounds like an ominous cross between Dodi Fayed and Carmen Miranda, won't tolerate podginess.

Since their romance began, Athina has reportedly been undergoing a strict diet and exercise programme supervised by her charming beau.

I have felt sorry for Athina since her mother died and the little pinch-faced brunette had to go and live with her dad and his beautiful blonde wife and their spookily perfect blond kids.

Athina could hardly feel anything but plain in that house, and now she has Doda standing behind her with a tape-measure.

You sense there's a whole gulf of unhappiness waiting to swallow this poor rich girl up. With her kind of money, Athina could swan around for the rest of her life, but she'll never feel more than the ugly duckling.

Every mother's workout

One in four British women takes no exercise, says a new survey. And I'm one of them. On Saturday, when I took no exercise, I carried a three-year-old boy, who now weighs as much as the kitchen table, out of the car in one arm. In the other arm, I carried four bags of shopping.

With my invisible third arm, I restrained the seven-year-old, while attempting to keep the front door ajar with my right leg. With the other leg, I prevented the cat escaping. All this while holding my handbag in my teeth.

Motherhood is a one-woman heptathlon. Anyone who says we're not taking enough exercise is either an idiot or a man.

Don't write off CJD so easily

The latest figures for cases of variant CJD have been described as "encouraging". Only one person has died this year from the human form of mad cow disease. Scientists believe the epidemic peaked three years ago and claimed "only" 122 lives in total.

Why do I find it hard to be encouraged? Because I know that behind every "only" lies a landscape of devastation. Most victims were in their teens and twenties.

Parents and siblings who have had to watch a healthy young adult sinking into a frightened and frightening dementia will never recover.

Luckily, it now seems that infected meat introduced into the human food chain was harmful only to people with a particular genetic characteristic. But luck is all it was.

The handling of the BSE crisis was a national scandal. Officialdom was seen at its worst as it moved first to protect the farmers and then to cover its own back as the dying started.

The Ministry of Agriculture's name was mud.

Only by some quirk of genetic fate have many more of us been spared. The CJD deaths may never exceed 200, but the casualties, the walking wounded, run into thousands. Encouraging?

I hardly think so.

Art that eats itself

As our art schools close their life-drawing rooms, and techniques that have stood artists in good stead for 500 years are deemed an embarrassing irrelevance, the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) puts a work on a £20,000 prize short list that will never be seen and may not even exist.

Carey Young's "Non-Disclosure Agreement" is a contract which stipulates that the piece must not go on show. ICA director Philip Dodd describes this Emperor's New Installation as "a powerful attack on a world where everything is on display".

Perhaps we should take this rigorous line of thinking to its logical conclusion. What could be more tediously old-school than an "institute" which puts "pictures" (yawn) on its "walls".

Maybe the ICA itself could be dissolved. Then the non-art could be shown on the non-walls of the non-museum.

I'd pay good money not to see that.