Balls

Anne McElvoy used Radio Four this morning to mention, repeatedly, her secondary schooling "twenty years ago". Sorry, but I was at the same school twenty years ago, and she was long gone by then.

However, she was right about what is now the near-impossibility of accessing within the state secondary sector the full range of proper academic subjects that her generation, rather demonstrating my previous point, took for granted. The response from Ed Balls? "Business", not to say "kids". Balls himself is public school and Oxford, and his father taught David Cameron at Eton.

No joy from Michael Gove, either. Like Tony Crosland, Harold Wilson (insofar as he ever came round to comps), possibly Margaret Thatcher, and certainly the ubiquitous Shirley Williams on the same programme, Gove still seems to want the grammar school curriculum without the grammar schools. That cannot be done.

Thatcher probably did understand that, and was, as ever, fighting the political struggle of her life, against the toffs and the lower orders with equal vigour. And Gove, in this as in his "special schools for the children of pushy parents with time and money" proposal, is probably doing the same. Leader of the eventual anti-Cameron putsch by the garagistes? Be afraid. Be very, very, very afraid.