The Charity Comission, which is meant to have the kind mission of assisting good causes, has gone a bit Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde all of a sudden. Its new, aggressive drive against independent schools threatens to make private education more elitist and place an unsustainable burden on the state education sector.

This current proposal will lead ultimately to a state of affairs in which children can be torn from their homes and forced into schools where they will be brainwashed into values that their parents find abhorrent - and where they will probably be kept illiterate and innumerate as these things were once measured, and where they might also be bullied into suicide or lifelong depression.