I wish I had kept my Brummie accent. I’d be taken more seriously

‘No one wants to send their son to Eton any more,’ I learned from last week’s Spectator Schools supplement. It explained how parents who’d been privately educated themselves were increasingly reluctant to extend the privilege to their offspring; some because they can’t bear for their darling babies to board, others because the fees are way out of their reach, or because class prejudice is so entrenched these days it means their kids probably won’t get into Oxbridge.

Then again, if you don’t send your kids to public school, you’ll be denying them never-to-be-repeated opportunities like the ones that boys at Radley have had this week: the chance to see not one, but two of your favourite Spectator writers — me and Brendan O’Neill, both invited as part of the school’s admirable Provocateur in Residence programme — slugging it out in class after class on vexed political issues from Donald Trump to safe spaces, #MeToo to student snowflakes, Antifa to Islamism.

We’ve just emerged, knackered, from a gruelling session on Brexit. Brendan and I are both fervent Leavers. But to a boy, the class was ardently Remain and — I gathered from a mole — had been briefed by their teacher to give us as hard a time as possible. No one was exactly rude but they did glower at us throughout like we’d just throttled their favourite guinea pig, and they didn’t appear swayed by any of our arguments.

I couldn’t resist goading them. ‘You know what happened in the French Revolution? I’m not saying it will be tumbril time again, necessarily. Just that it might be in your interests to find out more about why the lower orders voted the way they did, rather than just assuming they were an ignorant mob gulled by a slogan on the side of a bus.