Rob Blackhurst

AK13

08/01/2004

Humble origins score political points, writes Rob Blackhurst. But the truth is often murkier than the myth.

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Michael Howard's claim that, as a "grammar school boy", he was not "going to take any lessons from Blair, the "public school boy", on the importance of children gaining access to university" was a familiar shot for politicians keen to establish their proletarian roots. Grocer's daughter Thatcher used this line of attack on Shirley Williams and Tony Benn when they deigned to speak for the "working-class". And William Hague, luminary of a Rochdale comprehensive, used his flat Yorkshire vowels to mock the Prime Minister's radical credentials: "He's a forty-something, public school-educated barrister from Islington. Who does he think the establishment is?"

Since the class-conscious sixties, politicians have realised that electoral success depends on fostering a "log cabin myth" in which they pulled up their own bootstraps through moral virtue and hard work. The Tories, erstwhile defenders of Britain's landed interest, captured the spirit of Beatles Britain when they elected the son of a carpenter, Edward Heath, as leader in 1965. Since Macmillan, the state-educated have led the Conservatives: Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague and now Howard, with only the army school-educated Iain Duncan Smith breaking the line. Of Labour leaders since Gaitskill, only Foot and Blair have attended public schools and these men, whether through the donning of a donkey jacket or the insertion of glottal stops, have recognised the need to appear classless.

This desire for a reheatable story of humble origins has led to some becoming tight-lipped about afternoons spent on Eton's playing fields. Douglas Hurd invited ridicule when he claimed his father was a mere "tenant farmer" in his leadership battle against John Major, the son of a penniless acrobat. Baroness Jay nearly had to resign when she claimed her fee-paying school in Blackheath was a "pretty standard grammar school". Ed Balls, the chancellor's right-hand man, has been lampooned for failing to correct descriptions of himself as a "grammar school boy from Nottingham", despite attending Nottingham High School, one of the top fee-paying schools in the East Midlands.

But proving humble origins has not always been the politician's Eleven Plus. When Edward Heath was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1938, the Sunday Express ran a feature entitled "jobbing builder's son is Oxford Star". Heath was unhappy with the report; he felt his father deserved a grander title. And while Thatcher's Grantham origins proved a powerful political narrative to win over skilled working-class voters, they were only revealed when she became leader of the Opposition in 1975. Since entering parliament in 1959, "she had been happy to present herself as the archetypal Tory lady in a hat and pearls, quintessentially southern and suburban. She had a rich businessman husband, sent her children to expensive public schools, lived in Chelsea and represented Finchley", according to John Campbell's biography.

Even in the white heat of the 1960s Labour party, when Crosland vowed to "destroy every fucking grammar school", there doesn't seem to have been an over-preoccupation with living by schooling example. When Harold Wilson summoned Roy Jenkins to Downing Street and offered him promotion to the Cabinet as Education Secretary, Jenkins excused himself on the grounds that his children were privately educated. "Oh, that doesn't matter," replied Wilson nonchalantly. "So are mine".

Today, it does matter. Diane Abbott faces possible de-selection for choosing to send her son to £11,000-a-year school, and both Blair and his Solicitor General have had six of the political best for deciding to send their children to selective schools.

This need for politicians to prove their authenticity seems like Freud's narcissism of minor differences. The rows have become ever more spiteful and peevish, but the MPs involved come from similar middle-class backgrounds. By 1997, there were more Labour MPs that had attended public school than had manual jobs. When Brown launched his tirade against Laura Spence's failure to win a place at Oxbridge two years ago, he was playing on the egalitarianism of his Scottish Protestant roots. But Kirkcaldy High School, whilst not a fee-paying school like Fettes, was an ancient selective grammar school of the highest academic standards. Though Oxford-educated Blair could not have got away with the attack, Brown's highly privileged education was not much different.

It is certainly a world away from an earlier generation of MPs, people who graduated from the school of hard-knocks. As the former special advisers, central-office researchers and former journalists all clamber to get safe seats, how many of the twenty-first century Bevins, working at the coalface in today's call centres or supermarket shelves, will make it past these middle-class political prefects?