In Fide Fiducia

A lot of people have been in touch about Sunday's post on education. Many of you wanted to know what Peter Hitchens thought would be taught in his revived grammar schools. They would teach what the existing grammar schools taught at the moment.

That would not be his beloved imperial system of weights and measures, which he castigates his children's private schools for not having taught them, to the point of demanding that the entire education system be reconfigured. Well, not unless grammar schools taught that now. No one would be more delighted than I to see Classics taught in every town, but I cannot begin to imagine who would teach it.

Both parties have been led into General Elections by people who had been comprehensively educated from the age of 11. Both of those were heavily defeat by public schoolboys. Tony Blair beat William Hague, and David Cameron beat Ed Miliband. No one would describe Hague as undereducated, and that is before comparing him to Blair.

You can become a candidate for Prime Minister from a comprehensive school that had never been anything else while you were there, if at all. It is Prime Minister itself that you can be for only six weeks, without having won a General Election, until the money markets overthrew you in favour of a Head Boy of Winchester. No male product of any sort of mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister, and such a possibility has only ever presented itself in the persons of Hague and Miliband. It will not do so at the next General Election.

Beyond that, there seems to be deep and wide delight at my denunciation of the description of people who could pay school fees as middle-class, of the perversion of the fiscal debate by those fees, of their corruption of the parliamentary process across the House, of the hypocrisy of Conservative Education Ministers who bought their children out of their policies, and of the exclusion of the Left and the working class from the running of state schools, whereas left-wing figures were routinely given a platform by private schools. On doing deals with Tories in order to secure representation for our people, be on the bus or be under it, be at the table or be on the menu, and remember that it was a deal with the Conservative Party, as such, that secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson.

Everyone agrees that it is impossible to extrapolate from a handful of London schools to suggest that anything could be known about a comprehensive school from its postal address; indeed, comprehensives are located disproportionately in the more affluent parts of their catchment areas. I have hit home by pointing out that the last thing to stamp out private tuition would be a mass revival of the 11-plus. I have touched a raw nerve with the fact that private schools still used the IGCSE, which had been banned in the state sector for being too easy.

And a strikingly wide range of readers who were or had been based in these parts thoroughly enjoyed the story of the eight-year project to make me a governor of a school of which I was a pupil when that scheme was conceived, and indeed for the first half of its life, in place of someone who was almost indescribably unsuitable. In both cases when I have been made a school governor, one primary and one secondary, the place has initially still had the same Headmaster as when I had been a pupil. At the comp, a mere four years after I had left, he greeted me with, "Good afternoon, Mr Lindsay." "It's all right," I replied, "you can call me David if you like, George."