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. The Eton Boating Song is all about pleasure. It describes suppers of lobster and champagne (‘little boys drink it blind’) in the hay-harvest meadows after rowing down to the picnic. King’s Edward’s, Birmingham, which David attended, thinks of higher things: ‘Where the iron heart of England/ Beats beneath its sombre robe’, its song begins, and goes on to declare: ‘Here’s no place for fop or idler,/ Those who made our city great/ Feared no hardship, shirked no labour,/ Smiled at death and conquered fate.’ At its best, the Conservative culture combines these two strands of human character creatively — cavalier and roundhead fighting on the same side. At its worst, the mixture produces civil war.

After a fortnight of skirmishing, is there a chance of peace? I hope so, because I find myself in the rather weedy position of seeing right on both sides. The grammar-school party are rightly outraged by any hint that there is something antisocial about doing the best for one’s own children.