The Chief Rabbi is patron of a new school in Mill Hill which is due to open in September. He is also backing another planned for Golders Green, to be headed by one of his rabbis, Harvey Belovski. Both are worthy projects; but they are not Orthodox schools. They are free schools, which are required to limit to fifty per cent the places offered to children on a faith basis, with the rest on proximity.

It is not quite two years since the United Synagogue poured money into defending the Chief Rabbi's policy of preventing a child, whose mother's conversion he did not recognise, from attending the JFS. Given this latest development, one has to wonder: why?