Mid September saw the resignation of the Royal Society’s director of education, Professor Michael Reiss. His crime? He suggested that teachers should be respectful to creationist students and not ridicule their views. Hardly revolutionary as advice to teachers and entirely consistent with the Royal Society’s own policies. However, because Reiss was misreported in some papers as advocating teaching creationism in science classrooms, a capital offence in these days of fundamentalist atheism, he has had to go.

Despite originally supporting him, the Royal Society defends his resignation on the grounds that his speech was open to mis-interpretation. Not to anyone who bothered to get their facts right! Reiss, in fact, was advising on how to better engage students in order to persuade them of the merits of evolution. As Melanie Phillips’s column in the Spectator put it, this was a “Secular Inquisition at the Royal Society”.