Ask any one of the 187 female Labour MPs whether they would have made it to the House of Commons without an education and you would probably get short shrift. Most would wax lyrical about their school days and the teachers who taught and inspired them.

Yet the government of which those women make up almost half the total number of MPs is now targeting spending on “education and gender” for cuts in the overseas aid budget. It is beyond depressing.

Jenny Chapman, the international development minister, could not have been clearer when giving evidence to a select committee last week. The decision to reduce aid spending from 0.5% to 0.3% of national income by 2027 meant something had to give, and that was money that had hitherto been spent not just on building schools in poor countries but also encouraging girls to attend them. In a more challenging spending environment, the UK will now make health its priority.

Make no mistake, Chapman faces some unenviable choices. There is no soft landing when you have to implement a 40% cut in your budget. But a slash-and-burn approach to education is indefensible and would have been anathema to previous Labour governments.

Things were certainly different 20 years ago, when the final preparations for a G8 summit at Gleneagles involved the prime minister, Tony Blair, and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, successfully lobbying fellow world leaders for a $50bn aid package and a........

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