In Our Prime?

No male product of a mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister, and Wes Streeting would not change that. He should be more concerned that that no one from a state school had led a party to an overall majority at a General Election since 1992, and that there had not been a Prime Minister from Cambridge since 1935.

Angela Rayner did herself no favours, but her tax affairs could easily have been put right, and it soon became obvious that she had been thrown under the bus to ensure far less extensive legislation than was necessary and had been promised on the rights both of workers and of tenants. It also looks increasingly as if her removal was clearing the way for the attack on trial by jury and on the right of appeal.

Rayner and Rishi Sunak were both born, less than two months apart, in 1980. Both were first time voters in 2001, the high water mark of Tony Blair. Sunak had been Head Boy of Winchester, and had still yet to do a day's work in his life. Rayner had left school with literally nothing fully five years earlier, and was to make her way through her trade union. Make what you like of either of those backstories, but the fact that he was the first member of Generation Blair to become Prime Minister while she may well be the second makes Blairism a spectacular failure in its own terms even before considering the fact that Kemi Badenoch, who was also born in 1980, never did a day of school in this country until she was 16. Education, Education, Education, indeed.