The Spectator’s Notes | 2 June 2007

The grammar school row is proving not so much a Clause Four moment as a class war moment for the Tories — now it has produced a resignation. It is suggested that David Cameron’s Old Etonians are indifferent to those struggling to better themselves, because they do not know what struggle means. The Cameronites imply that the grammar-school supporters are not really concerned with social mobility, but with good, free education for a thin layer of bright, middle-class children (their own). How strange that David Willetts, the party’s education spokesman, should now be enlisted in the Etonian camp. When we were undergraduates together — he at Oxford, I at Cambridge, but we were (and are) friends — David was held up as the type of the grammar-school meritocrat — diligent, serious, ambitious, brainy, bespectacled. David and I would compare the different ethoses (is that the correct plural? David would know) by comparing our school songs.