James Hawes notes that Harry Potter turned round the fortunes of public schools. Their products now over-dominate acting, media, sports, Oxbridge. But have state schools and universities learnt from this that ritual, mystique, religion and arcane learning naturally appeal? No.

Apart from Oxbridge (divided) universities and state schools have gone in the opposite direction of boring and sinister prose. Suggest the relevance of HP to them and they smile condescendingly. Meanwhile the Maoist equality, diversity and identity agenda now has a stranglehold.

Hawes somewhat plausibly reads Harry Potter as our Norman/Saxon duality writ large. A boarding school ancestral with secret knowledge admits some children of commoners (muggles). And yet Rowling while sensibly not PC is most definitely on the Soc Dem left. How to explain that?

I feel myself the clue lies in the albeit updated very ‘Fifties’ feel of the book. Implicitly there is nostalgia for an age of greater economic equality and class unity that nevertheless was also, and paradoxically, more hierarchical and deferential to status and mystique.

One could construe that as a kind of realism: our Norman-French-Saxon duality cannot be undone. But the ‘Norman’ meritocracy must not only allow recruitment (as has perhaps uniquely done since 1066) but also be genuinely paternalist and blend with the folk Saxon legacy.

Thus implies influence going both ways. For all their faults and inequities of intake varying from one region to the next, grammar schools were about this: they mediated better public school things downwards but linked them to local tradition which the older ones embodied.

Arguably the greatest recent age of Oxbridge was when the grammar school intake loomed large. Comprehensives *could* have extended the grammar school mediation between elite culture Norman and folk culture Saxon. Instead they have in the main totally betrayed both legacies.

And for what? As with most universities now, for a dire combination of ‘right-wing’ functionalism with ‘left-wing’ individualistic nihilism about morality with its cult of ‘choice’ and mantra of ‘respect’.

Levels of disillusionment with the EDI agenda and administrative control of syllabi in British provincial universities could lead to a mass exodus of talent and a questioning of the very existence of universities in their current form. New technology makes alternatives possible.