I’m proud to come out as an Eton parent

I was just traipsing across the fields towards Common Lane, there to collect Boy en route to his St Andrews’ Day F-Blockers’ exhibition match of the Wall Game, when I was accosted by a splendid, Spectator-reading type who’d parked his car next to mine.

‘Are you James Delingpole?’ he asked.

I admitted that I was. We got talking. There was only one possible reason for my being there, as he and I both knew. ‘Do you think I should finally out myself?’ I said. ‘I mean I’ve been living the lie for what seems like an age. And it’s so unlike me to keep secrets from my readers. Let’s face it, fearless and frank autobiography rather is my schtick.’ My new friend agreed that perhaps the time had come. So here goes. I have become an Eton parent.

‘But why would you want to send your boy to a school where he’s going to be stigmatised for life?’ asked another friend (whose boy is going to Winchester — so, like, he can talk…).

The easy answer would be that it wasn’t my choice, it was Boy’s. His appetite was whetted at about seven when he read Charlie Higson’s Young James Bond books, many of which are set at ‘School’. Then he went to Papplewick, which is one of Eton’s feeder preps, so inevitably he was keen to go where lots of his friends are going. What it really came down to, though, was the kit.

And I don’t blame him for this, because it was why I most wanted him to go there too. (That was also the real reason I took up fox-hunting, by the way. So I had a legitimate reason to look splendid in a black hunt coat with a stock and a gold stock pin.)