School Daze No More

Extend the school day and cut the holidays, Gavin Williamson? Well, whose school day, and whose holidays? The pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the fact that the schools that produce our lords and masters are barely open.

The Government was threatening state schools with court if they did not stay open after the private schools had already broken up in the ordinary course of things. With catastrophic consequences, it ordered the state schools back for one day, a week before the private schools would have gone back even if Covid-19 had never existed.

"Prep" and what is in any case now the quite rare "Saturday school" are known to the rest of us as "homework". On average, the finished products do no better than anyone else at university. Boris Johnson recites the opening passage of The Iliad in the wrong order, so that it makes no sense, and by all accounts his pronunciation is awful. His claim to turn to it for consolation in times of trouble has no identifiable connection to its content.

Yet he is the Prime Minister, and under the terms of the unwritten Constitution the rest of us never can be. None of this has anything to do with state grammar schools. You can give anyone you like an Oxbridge degree, but if they did not go to public school, then they did not go to public school. This is not about academic qualifications, but about social connections.

Hey, ho. If, after the briefest of interludes, Parliament is once again just one of those things which posh people do and the rest of us do not, then what matters is to have the ear of the top people rather than to moan and whine about never being allowed to join them. Both the London Conference on Intelligence, and the former Revolutionary Communist Party, have managed that. Therefore, so can we. And we must.

I am beavering away on the creation of our think tank, of our Fellowships at one or more sympathetic universities, of our qualification for aspirant parliamentary candidates of any party or none, of our weekly current affairs magazine, of our fortnightly satirical magazine, of our monthly cultural review, of our quarterly academic journal, and of our arrangements to secure representation on public bodies by bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right.