Ed Miliband says he went to a comprehensive school — and a lot of feathers are instantly ruffled. Jeremy Paxman (Malvern College) applied a full acid-bath of scorn on Newsnight to Mr Miliband’s focus on his Haverstock Hill education. Over on Planet Cameron, where Compsters are as rare as members of the Nick Clegg Appreciation Society, they carp that Ed, skipping to school in NW3 from Belsize Park, was hardly a ragamuffin child of the Bash Street ilk.
Having had a good snuffle into Mr Miliband’s schooldays, though, I can confirm that the place was a merry mix of the estates, with some bright kids with books by Eric Hobsbawm on the shelves. Indeed, far from being too posh, Ed has, as George Bush might have put it, mis-forgotten some of his less obliging remarks about his alma mater. When I interviewed him during his leadership campaign, he told me then that he was often scared at school and found the atmosphere tough and at times intimidating. He had not, he admitted, been as blithe about the comprehensive experience as his elder brother, and often felt lonely.
Somehow, on the way to the Labour conference, this has been smoothed into a memory of a diverse character-forming experience. I fully recognise this tendency as a fellow Compster of that era.
It’s easier (and a bit flattering to yourself) to turn the ups and downs of the Grange Hill years into a teenage Sparta, from which you can claim to have emerged imbued with a magical ability to talk to a cross-section of the population, but I am siding with Ed on this one. The Comp generation is still unloved in public life, qualifying neither for the die-hard meritocratic status of grammar school boys and girls, nor belonging to the complex social organogram of the privately educated. It is especially odd, given that anyone aged under 50 who didn’t have a private education or live in the few places where grammars were intact is a veteran of the state system: a very large majority.
So we are the ones who hiss when Ed’s Haverstock reminiscences are dismissed by female broadcasters sounding like St Hilda’s captain of lacrosse, or disdained as phoney by blokeish news gurus whose “independent” school backgrounds are deftly tucked away on the Wikipedia entry.
It is frankly bizarre to complain about Mr Miliband parading his schooldays when both the Tory and last Labour leaders have spoken about the deaths of their children. If we want revelations from our politicians, it is reasonable for them to talk about their schools.
Anyway, the older one gets, the more formative that time feels. If I have a bee in my bonnet about reforming education, it is not least because I’ve seen the state system up close and feel frustration (particularly with incurious reform-laggards lurking around Labour) about their plans for improvement. We’re leaving the bog-standard comp behind as a model which failed too many. But it’s sleight of hand to suggest that a politician from a London state school is as distant from the masses as an Etonian.
I’d say there is always a bit of self-consciousness in the professional elites expressing derision. The saga of Mr Miliband’s schooldays tells us little more about him but quite a lot about the rest of us.
