The conventional wisdom on the grammar school row is that it came at precisely the wrong time for the Cameroons. With Brown about to take over at No.10, they needlessly shot themselves in the foot so this narrative has it. This is undoubtedly true but the very nature of the operation the Cameroons are engaged in means that they are going to make mistakes as they try and ‘challenge’ their party.
There’s a case to be made that it is better they received this shot across the bows now rather than after the policy groups reported. It would have been much harder to walk back from a radical—but half-baked—new policy that they had proudly adopted as an early pledge. Indeed, the upshot of the whole grammar school row is that Tory policy on the subject remains unchanged since Cameron won the leadership yet the party is now, hopefully, more wary of the eye-catching initiative.
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