Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Who cares that Theresa May went to Oxford? She clearly did not learn very much when she was there, and she has clearly never read anything since she left, two thirds of her lifetime ago.

I hold two Durham degrees, I used to be a supply teacher, I was a governor of two excellent schools for many years, I come from a fairly teachery family, I am still in touch with numerous people who taught me, and all the rest of it. 

But the fuss over whether or not Jeremy Corbyn called that stupid woman a "stupid woman" has crystallised something that had been forming in my mind about his own party. Before he became Leader, 50 per cent of its members were schoolteachers. Not only is that certainly no longer the case, but I doubt that very many of them even turn up to meetings these days.

They would have, you see, no desire to sit in a room full of their own least favourite present or recent pupils, but who were no longer obliged to pretend to be less clever than they were, or to pretend to be less well-read than people who had never read anything that they were not employed to teach, rather than taking the opportunity to acquire an education during the teachers' three-month holidays, inviolable weekends, and evenings that began at three o'clock.

Both main parties are rapidly becoming alliances between public schoolboys and those, also mostly male, autodidacts. That the latter may not have done very well at the teachers' precious exams is a matter of indifference to them.

It is not even likely to hold them back. From their middle or even early teens, they are fully plugged into the networks that will increasingly look after them politically even without a degree or much else on paper, and which in any case might get them into universities that, with their unconditional offers and what have you, have largely given up pretending to care about anything that went on in schools.

What has become the Corbynite Left, and the various strands of the broadly Ron and Rand Paulish Right, may have been fringe elements in academia for many years. But undergraduate admissions is one of those portfolios which are often given to fringe figures because no one else wants them and everyone else is in a position to turn them down. 

An academic and a Sixth Former who were both Corbyn supporters might by now have known each other, at least online, for three years, the length of a BA. At least online, they would almost certainly have friends in common, and often very influential friends at that. Who needs a reference from school? If that kind of thing is not already happening, and not only on the Left, then it very soon will be.