Mick Philpott, a good reason to cut benefits As this depraved and abusive set-up flourished, Mick made headlines by demanding a bigger council house. No one, not the children's schools, not priests, not social workers, not benefits managers, not councillors or MPs, challenged the morality of a household where 11 young children by two mothers were sleeping in three bedrooms at best. Like the King in The King and I, Mick Philpott was a bigamist potentate who knew no law but his own: "A flock of sheep and you the only ram/ No wonder you're the wonder of Siam." The one person bold enough to challenge this thuggish abuse of the welfare state was Ann Widdecombe. Mick called her an "interfering bitch" when she dared to suggest in her programme on the benefits culture that he could work to support his family. With the cameras rolling, affable Mick proved he was capable of holding down a job. As soon as the TV crew departed, the Derby dodger was back at the child-benefit farm with his feet up. Talk about taking the Mick. Does a case as extreme as the Philpotts have any lessons to teach us? As thousands of decent families brace themselves for benefits cuts, we should accept that Mick Philpott is no more representative of his class than Lord Lucan was of his. Toff or trash, each man was a murderous wife-controlling b------ who cheated the system. But we need to acknowledge that 878,000 people who were claiming incapacity benefit opted not to even submit to the new tests to see if they were fit for work. That's nearly a million Britons who were taking the Mick. And they didn't stop until they were about to be found out. No one who saw the first episode of The Village, BBC's harrowing new drama series, could wish to go back to the bad old days, when mothers put saucers of tripe on the table for their families and went hungry themselves. But something has gone awry when skivers like Mick Philpott feel all-powerful and society cannot summon the moral will to say "No. Enough. What future would the Philpott children have had, brought up in that godforsaken house? Surely, social services should have removed them. If society hadn't turned a blind eye, would Mairead have colluded with Mick in her own sexual abasement and the slaughter of her own kids? If child benefit was stopped after the third baby, would so many have been born to suffer and die? I felt like weeping with the children's aunt when she said: "At least they won't be hurt any more. They've gone to a better place. We may not be able to make a heaven on earth for every child, but we can stop subsidising devils like Mick Philpott. A perfect bee for Sophie's bonnet What was Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, thinking, wearing a skin-tight blue skirt to church with the Royal family on Easter Sunday (pictured)? The zip, which stretched from the Countess's coccyx to the back of her knees, looked like an open invitation to undress her rather than an outfit in which to contemplate the most sacred day in the Christian calendar. Has she no sense of occasion? I reckon Sophie needs to consult Ann, a veteran seamstress and one of the contestants in The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC Two). With her upswept, silver Joan Hickson "do, 81-year-old Ann is the embodiment of elegant competence. When Ann set about the task of making an A-line skirt, you just knew you were in supremely capable hands. Put it this way, Ann probably came out of the womb and cut her own umbilical cord before giving the belly button "a final press" and a check to make sure there were no bits of tacking thread left. Bliss. My colleague Charles Spencer famously described a West End play as "pure theatrical Viagra." Well, Sewing Bee is pure televisual Valium. You could not possibly be stressed or unhappy while you watch it. Even the stabs at drama - "Tilly's baggy pockets leave her in sixth place!" - do not set the heart racing. For those of us who took so long to make a skirt in school needlework that the midi had gone out of fashion by the time we'd finished, there is great relaxation to be had watching deft fingers fiddle with bias binding. I cannot be the only viewer secretly hoping that the superb Sandra will take her scissors to presenter Claudia Winkleman's fringe. Sewing Bee may lack the knife-edge terrors of Masterchef, but by way of compensation it does have Savile Row tailor Patrick Grant as a judge. The most immaculate man you've ever seen, Patrick makes David Beckham look like Swampy. And he already has a withering line in comments sewn up: "It's good from afar, but it's far from good." Listen and learn, your Royal Highness. All those Gove-haters have a lot to learn The National Union of Teachers does not care for Michael Gove's new curriculum. According to these outraged pedagogues, schools should not produce pupils who "just know stuff." After all, who needs facts embedded in the human hard drive when you can look everything up on the internet? The NUT has called Mr Gove's perverse plan to make sure that children do indeed know stuff "a Gradgrind pub quiz." Ah, dear Mr Gradgrind! Whenever critics of rote-learning are gathered for a group hug or a Two Minute Hate against grammar, they soon spit out the name of Dickens's rigid schoolmaster. In Hard Times, Gradgrind believes that pupils should be treated as "pitchers to be filled to the brim with facts." What the Gove-haters fail to realise is that, were Dickens writing today, it is not the stern acquisition of knowledge he would be satirising. It would be them. Dickens was not anti-learning; what he attacked was the prevailing nonsense of the day. Imagine the fun the great novelist could have with modern educational theory. My friend's 13-year-old daughter, who attended a frankly terrible comprehensive school, once told her mum they had spent two days being taught something called thinking skills. "The trouble is, Mum, we don't know anything to think about," said Hannah glumly. How right Hannah was. Nuffink will come of nuffink. She might almost have quoted King Lear, except she wouldn't be taught any because Shakespeare is from the past, which is, like, before 1970. A lack of general knowledge is now so widespread that a survey this week discovered that most British kids think Renoir plays for Paris Saint-Germain. To that, the anti-Goves would respond: So why not Google Renoir or King Lear? Fair enough, except you need your own internal Wikipedia to know what to look for. Leading educationalists claim that facts and dates are a barrier to understanding, when they could not possibly have risen to their own positions without being conversant with those very dates and facts. None of them would admit it, but they were all little Gradgrinds once.