Floreat

It is extremely unusual for Cabinet Ministers to lose their seats, but in 1997 we watched it happen to seven of them in one night. All sorts of things about Britain since then can be gleaned by examining their subsequent progress. As dear old William Waldegrave retires as Provost of Eton, consider that he was nominated by Gordon Brown. There have only ever been six Labour Prime Ministers, but five of them have nominated Provosts of Eton, the exception being, of all people, Ramsay MacDonald. The appointment is formally made by the monarch, and there is talk of a woman this time, so the obvious candidate would be Lord Waldegrave's sister, Lady Susan Hussey.

Then again, this appointment, which he could hardly refuse, would at least temporarily solve the problem of what to do with Boris Johnson. Does a Prime Minister who was Head Boy of Winchester hate Eton quite that much? In the person of Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn might also have caused the appointment of a Wykehamist, had he been given the opportunity. No male product of a mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister, so Rishi Sunak is probably Winchester's second and last. Why would he not make the most of it?

Sunak was Winchester's sixth Chancellor of the Exchequer, two of whom have been Labour. Of all the Labour Chancellors ever, more than one fifth have gone to the same school as four other Chancellors including Sunak, and Labour, a party that has hardly ever been in office, has provided one third of the Chancellors from that school. Another Labour Chancellor was the Old Etonian son of the chaplain to Queen Victoria and tutor to the future King George V.

Labour has proposed a privately schooled First Lord of the Treasury at the last two General Elections and at five of the last seven, as it will again next time, and it has proposed a privately schooled Second Lord at all of the last four, as the incumbent in the first case. Ahead of the next General Election, Jeremy Hunt should challenge Rachel Reeves to a televised debate. John McDonnell could then point out that neither Philip Hammond nor Sajid Javid had ever dared do that to him.

Desperate to appear to have any specific policy, Labour has revived its perennial internal crowd-pleaser, the imposition of VAT on school fees. That one is never going to happen, because the promise of it is too useful for when Labour activists start to ask what their party is actually for. Even without the VAT, the fees for commercial schools are far beyond the reach of anyone in the middle of anything. You can go to school for free in this country, and most people do. But this needless expense makes very affluent people feel as if they are struggling, since they really do have to make certain sacrifices, by their own standards, in order to meet it. In turn, that makes them very vocal against, for example, a modest increase in their own direct taxation.

Moreover, school fees corrupt the parliamentary process. To pay them, the Conservatives insist that an MP has to be paid a gargantuan salary. They then take other work as well, but by then the meeting of their initial demand has drawn other, mostly Labour, candidates who have been attracted by the money. Plenty of people would happily become Labour MPs for £40,000 per annum, and a certain number would do it for half that, which would still be more than many people had to live on even in London. They would never get near it, though. People with pound signs in their eyes also have very sharp elbows. But the present salary is the existing rate for the job. The principles of trade unionism demand that everyone who was entitled to it take it in full, and that it not be cut, either in absolute terms or by being allowed to fall behind inflation. Level up, not down.

Yet while we are seeking to make the world a better place, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist Education Ministers, usually Conservatives, who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me.

And it must be said that the schools that they favour do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. The Left and the working class, and perhaps especially the rural working class, need to bypass both the municipal Labour Right and the Liberal Establishment both in education and in the media. The EU referendum and the 2019 General Election have confirmed that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters who deserve direct representation on local public bodies, on national public bodies, in the media, and at the intersection of the public and media sectors.

It is in the running of state-funded schools that the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. By all accounts, Corbyn turned down several invitations to speak at public schools. George Galloway regularly accepts such invitations. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state-funded school might offer a platform to anyone from the Left. We ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people.

That would involve doing deals with the Conservatives. Such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world. The strikes are approaching conclusion with the proof of that point. In contrast to Labour's intransigence, the workers in struggle will at least get something out of the Government. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

"One size fits all" is an apt description of a system that takes people from every part of Britain, of all countries, and turns them out with the same accent, an accent that only they have. If applicants from that background are finding it more difficult to gain admission to Oxford or Cambridge, then that may be because the people on the other side of the desk were now a much more international lot, to whom class quirks of speech, dress and so on were not merely unimpressive, but imperceptible. Of course, such features still do and will matter to the people who run plenty of other things in Britain, so with or without the small extra expense of VAT on the fees, the schools that inculcated them will not be going bust anytime soon. If they were banned in Britain, then they would set up abroad.

Their favoured IGCSE, which has indeed been banned in the state sector for being too easy, is therefore safe for the foreseeable future. That may be another reason why Oxbridge and socially comparable institutions no longer found their products attractive. But having been denied admission to the universities that they did not quite consider beneath them, the intense ideologues who had hitherto gone straight into overtly political roles at 22 will henceforth be going straight into them at 19. They will retain those roles no matter who had won anything so vulgar as an election.

There is therefore a public interest in the King's appointment of a new Provost of Eton. Like the Police, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the monarchy has always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of it is profoundly so. The question is whose politics. We ought not to be seeking to abolish the Royal Prerogative, but to exercise it. The whole of it, no matter to which committee or self-perpetuating oligarchy any part of it might have been surrendered. All of it must be taken back, and in most cases that would be perfectly simple to do.

Previous Governments have handed over jaw-dropping amounts of power to the Deep State, having of course been installed for the purpose. These people clearly never wanted to run the country. Again, that was why they were put in by the people who did. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate, or the Provost of Eton, not that that last ever has been handed over? Never mind the judiciary? Or 26 members of Parliament? And how entitled is the Liberal Establishment in the Church of England, to presume the right to appoint those 26 legislators over the rest of us? (Oddly enough, since the Provost of Eton is a member of the Convocation of Canterbury, and thus of the General Synod, "if he be in Priest's Orders in the Church of England", none seems to have been in such Orders since the retirement of the dying Edmond Warre in 1918.)

But those powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude, but it is still there. Corbyn would have made full use of the Royal Prerogative; there are no republicans in possession of the powers of a Medieval monarch. Disgracing Eton and Oxford, Johnson also showed tendencies in that direction. So the Deep State had to get rid of the pair of them, even before either of them could turn his attention to reversing the statutory surrender of control over monetary policy. Lest Sunak and Hunt ever hint at doing so, then the Deep State has ensured that it has the shallow Starmer and Reeves on whom to fall back.

Thankfully, the opinion polls bear no resemblance to real votes cast, and even the Labour poll lead has halved since Sunak took over. Halved. The Labour vote has gone through the floor at all but one by-election since Starmer became Leader, with one of those recording Labour's lowest ever share of the vote. Council seats that were held or won under Corbyn have fallen like sandcastles, taking control of major local authorities with them. That is the bread and butter of the party's right wing, who are not otherwise the most employable of people.

With nearly two years still to go until the next General Election, Starmer's personal rating is negative not only nationally, but in every region apart from London, and it is still in decline. Starmer's dishonesty is becoming a story. He lied to his party members to get their votes, so he would lie to anyone else to get their votes. We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.