Comprehension Exercise

In these first and last days of at least the first Prime Minister to have attended a comprehensive school from the age of 11, it is being claimed that she was no great advertisement for comprehensive schools, which is true enough, although no such argument is ever made against disastrous Prime Ministers from public schools.

What cannot be asserted, however, is that her school could not have been a "proper" comp, since it had managed to produce a Prime Minister. That is a circular argument, and in any case Liz Truss, like Theresa May before her, refuses to give any credit whatever to the school that sent her to Oxford.

Roundhay was and is an affluent part of Leeds, but so what? Even if everyone at the school had come from there, then that would still have been a different demographic from the intake of any nearby private school. Even that, though, will not have been the case. I spent seven years as a pupil and eight as a governor of a comprehensive school that was in the most affluent part of its catchment area, but that said nothing at all about the place, as it still does not.

Let me take you back to the Golden Britpop Summer of 1995. Three years earlier, the most inexplicable governor had been appointed to my school. To this day, 30 years later, no one will own up to having had any part in that appointment. School was at its wit's end, and by then what in those days could in these parts still call itself "the party" was already anxious to neutralise me by co-option, so it had wanted to exercise the County Council's power of recall and instead install me with effect from 23rd September 1995, my eighteenth birthday.

That would have made me a governor of the school for almost the whole of my Upper Sixth, so school understandably put the kibosh on it, although on the clear understanding that it did want me as soon as was quite decent. A year later, when the problem governor's term would have been up, then school and the party were aligned and allied in my favour, but the distant Diocese was unconvinced, since at that point I was still the only person who did not know that I was eventually going to go over to Rome. The day had yet to come when the late Bishop Kevin Dunn would promise to initiate my candidacy for this largely Catholic parliamentary seat by publicly anointing me. When I suggested accompaniment by Zadok the Priest, then he replied, "Why not?" He was not joking. Requiescat in pace.

So I did not become a governor a fortnight after my A-level results, and three weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday. But four years later, I had already been a governor of a primary school for the first of eight years, and I had been safely aboard the Barque of Saint Peter for a year. When I had written to school to request prayers upon my reception, then it had offered a Mass of Thanksgiving. Yes, really. It was the usual weekly Mass, but it was said for that intention. I got a card. The funny governor's days were numbered, and no third term was awarded in 2000. Instead, I came into my inheritance at last.

I keep being told that I ought to be brought back, but that is unlikely to happen in the near future, although the Council no longer has any role in the matter, it is anyway no longer under Labour control, and the Diocese has already caused any problem at that end to disappear into thin air. I am terribly flattered, of course, and I have never stopped knowing a lot of what went on. Yes, I do mean never. The present Governing Body is perhaps a unique concentration of my parliamentary voters; they account for at least a large minority of it. A recent reappointment, after a break of some years, had in the meantime signed my nomination papers at the last General Election. More than one member was a character witness at my sentencing. So never say never, but not for quite a while yet.

Seven years as a pupil there had made me broadly aware that little or nothing could be gleaned from a comprehensive school's relatively fancy postal address, and eight years as a governor gave me a thoroughly detailed appreciation of that fact. People who lack even the former knowledge have little or no experience of the matter, and therefore ought not to pass comment on it.