What Life Is Like For Most People

It is what the young people call top trolling on the part of Boris Johnson to have replaced Gavin Williamson with a gentleman of swarthier hue.

Wes Streeting's tantrum about Nadhim Zahawi's private schooling suggests that Streeting knows what he has done. He sees himself as a potential Prime Minister, which is never the mark of a sane person, but he realises that his own support for Tony Blair and Keir Starmer contributes to the impossibility of a state educated occupant of 10 Downing Street.

When Harold Wilson died, then The Guardian said that he had been an unimaginable Prime Minister until he had happened, after which it had been his predecessors who were unimaginable, while the Daily Telegraph bemoaned that he had made it impossible to become Prime Minister from a major public school, thereby getting in a sly dig at Fettes. How little they both knew.

Although it is probably going to be earlier, assume a General Election on the official date of Thursday 2nd May 2024. That will be 32 years after anyone from a state school had last led a party to an overall majority, and 60 years after the only occasion on which a state educated Leader had ever won an overall majority against a public schoolboy, in the year of Boris Johnson's birth.