School Standards

Far from being able to make twice as much outside, MPs who have lost their seats have a more than 50 per cent chance of still being unemployed 12 months later.

The only thing to know about the former Ruth Smeeth is that she lost her seat to Jonathan Gullis. But if no school, not a single one, will now employ Gullis as a teacher, then what are the opponents of VAT on school fees fighting for?

That policy has not been properly thought through. Is it to be a permanent, if extremely small, source of revenue? Or is it to be a means of closing down the schools in question? It cannot be both.

Closing down those schools would deprive the Labour Party of its future almighty staffers. Anyone who has ever dealt with the Labour Party's staff will have noticed both their extreme youth and their extreme poshness. As the Forde Report set out forensically, that combination makes them dazzlingly arrogant and uncouth. Such are the people who always really run the Labour Party. And here we are.

Like comparable adolescents on what is nominally the other side, they only ever, and very recently, sat the IGCSE, which is their schools' stock-in-trade. Michael Gove banned it from the state sector because it was too easy. Yet Gullis is deemed incapable of teaching even that. Two years ago, he was the Minister for School Standards.