Andrew Neil

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

During the Blair-Brown decade social concerns - what kind of society we have become - have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

The Spectator' has to be managed and people have to report. We all have bosses in this world and that's true of 'The Spectator' too.

I travelled through the night in a bus with the Kentucky Tea Party en route to a massive rally in Washington. For the most part I found them decent, self-reliant, regular Americans who feared the American Dream was now over, not just for them but for their children and grandchildren.

No-one in their right mind would buy the 'New Statesman' and change it from being a left-wing to a right-wing magazine.

Britain's great postwar meritocratic experiment was broad-based, but it was in politics that the change was most dramatic.

There are two ways you can buy an education in this country. You can pay the fees. Or you can cheat and buy a house in an area where there's a good school.

The Sunday paper is an odd British cultural tradition.

I don't say for a moment that the far right is no longer a problem. We have seen the neo-Nazi nutters in Charlottesville in America.

I even remember at the age of five watching a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan that was quite terrifying because it was men in white sheets who looked like ghosts to me.

I spend a lot of time in New York.

It is actually getting much harder for someone from an ordinary background to break through the ranks. In the period from 1964 to 1997, every single Prime Minister - from Harold Wilson to John Major - was the product of a state school.