Politics

Cameron has a good case: shame he’s got diverted by the grammar schools row

26 May 2007

Yet the Tory leader prefers instead to emphasise that grammars are a thing of the past — ‘a chain around our necks’ — and the Conservative party should grow up and accept it. He did not expect this storm and has been caught without convincing answers to his party critics. If he wants greater diversity of schools, why not a few more grammars? The answer lies, largely, in his fear of frightening voters. ‘We have to be careful what we say. We must use Blair’s language, to present this as the conclusion of Blair’s ideas,’ one Cameroon adviser told me.

A few months before he died, Eric Forth asked one of his more mischievous questions when the newly elected David Cameron came to address the 1922 Committee. ‘I believe in big business, low taxes and grammar schools,’ he said at the meeting in January last year. ‘Am I still a Conservative?’

The answer to his question lies in the reception area of Harris City Academy in Crystal Palace, the flagship of Mr Blair’s new schools. There is a plaque there that visiting Labour ministers hurriedly walk past, commemorating its opening as a City Technology College by John Major when he was Prime Minister. The freeing up of the education marketplace is a Conservative mission that, if implemented properly, could represent a bigger step forward than expanding grammar schools. But the first task for Mr Cameron is to make this case to his party.