Mark Andrews: PM's pricey specs and dubious taste in music, mobile phones in schools, and the scary thing about exploding pagers

The word is 'given'.

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With that off my chest, how can anyone justify £2,500 worth of specs? They are, when all's said and done, just a few small pieces of plastic.

Of course the Prime Minister needs to look smart, and nobody wants to see him looking like Jack Duckworth in a pair of NHS jobs held together with sticking plasters. But £2,500 is taking it a bit far. I'm not sure I would want to spend £2,500 on glasses, even if I was given the money. The responsibility of looking after them would be too much of a burden.

Unless of course there's another reason why he's burned through £2,500 on his glasses. Maybe he sits on a lot of them.

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Most embarrassing of all must be the ultimate in centrist dad kitsch, the £698 worth of Coldplay tickets. Fill the stadium out, did he?

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Well done to the Ormiston academy chain for banning the use of mobile phones in schools. There is no reason at all why a school-age child should need a mobile phone, and certainly not a smartphone in the classroom.

What I'm less convinced by is the contrived methods the school is planning to use to enforce the ban. Making children put their phones in lockers and pouches at the start of the day. It all sounds very time consuming, and very easy for pupils to get round. Wouldn't it be easier, and probably cheaper, to install a signal jammer in all school buildings, like they used to do in hospitals? Unless, of course, some of the teachers are nursing phone addictions themselves.

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And while we're about it, let's get rid of all the laptops, tablets, and online learning methods, and go back to kids using exercise books and pencils, and teachers using a blackboard and chalk. If schools want to use them in special IT lessons, then fair enough, but it can hardly be conducive to child welfare making them spend hours staring at computer screens – before going home to stare at their screens some more.

And that's before we come to how much money it would save.

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Shed no tears for the savages of so-called Hezbollah who have come a cropper from their exploding pagers and walkie talkies. If it's possible to take out those bloodthirsty monsters while keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, then I'm all for it.

But isn't it just a little scary that such an operation is possible?

Because you can bet that if the Israelis have the technology to perform an attack like that, it won't be too long before those who wish us harm – like the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, or even the terror groups themselves – get hold of it too.