‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons,’ was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s immortal line to express his practical scepticism of hifalutin self-aggrandisement. We should probably have some similar aphorism about high-profile left-wingers who loudly advocate for egalitarianism in education while quietly sending their own children to selective or fee-paying schools. The list is long, and includes such influential figures as Diane Abbott, David Aaronovitch, Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman, and Corbynite éminence grise Seumas Milne. Nick Clegg and Tony Blair, meanwhile, both sent children to the London Oratory, nominally a comprehensive state school but with the kind of highly expensive catchment area that renders the label more than a little ridiculous.  

The newest member of the club is Miatta Fahnbulleh, Andy Burnham’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Having supported the addition of VAT to school fees – a policy which has led directly to the closure of multiple schools and added perhaps 30,000 children to the state system – it has emerged that all three of her children are privately educated.

The standard defence offered in these situations is that parents are entitled to make the most appropriate decisions for their own families. We don’t know the circumstances, so it is not our place to judge. Children have different needs, and so forth. Now this is all true; politicians and commentators are not necessarily obliged to sacrifice their own children on the altar of their ideology. However, those who offer such mitigation rarely seem to reflect on the logical corollary of their argument: that they should not be preventing other parents from making similar choices. To........

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