The Privileged Rory Weal?

The whole point of grammar schools is that they have nothing to do with parental income. That was why no one ever closed more grammar schools than Margaret Thatcher, and that was why David Cameron led every single one of his MPs in voting to make it illegal - yes, illegal - to set up any more. Young Weal owes his grammar school education in Kent to Eric Hammond.

More broadly, Labour was never the party of anything like the whole of the working classes, nor did those classes ever provide anything like all of its support. Britain has neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie in the Marxist or Continental sense, but several working classes and several middle classes. There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds. Especially in Labour's early years, those backgrounds routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties.

Herbert Morrison professed never to have seen any conflict "between Labour and what are known as the middle classes". Aneurin Bevan denounced class war, calling instead for "a platform broad enough for all to stand upon" and for the making of "war upon a system, not upon a class". Both served under Clement Attlee (Haileybury, Oxford, the Bar and the Officer Corps), who was succeeded by Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford).

Harold Wilson was a Fellow of an Oxford college, and the son of a chemist and a schoolteacher. Jim Callaghan was a tax inspector. Michael Foot's public school may have been the Quakers' Leighton Park, but it was still a public school, which duly sent him to Oxford; he and his brothers indicated just how far the sons of a provincial solicitor could climb if they were sent to the "right" schools. Neil Kinnock's father may have been a miner, but he himself was a lecturer. John Smith was a QC. We all know about Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.

And why not?