Bash Street comp beats the snobbish parade all ends up

My posh friends were horrified I sent my two sons to state schools, writes Rowan Pelling, but I'm having the last laugh

- Rowan Pelling

Hear that plaintive screech on the wind? That’s me on my teenyweeny violin playing a lament for all the parents who will have to yank their offspring out of private schools, due to Sir Kier Starmer’s class war. I’m talking, of course, about Labour’s decision to stop tax breaks on private education, meaning VAT will now be levied on fees and some people will have to send sprogs to Bash Street comp with all the great unwashed. Farewell cadets, small classes, fencing and Mandarin; so long meditation and sea bream for lunch!

But that’s not what anyone’s paying for, of course, whatever they claim. Nope, they are forking out up to £50k a year to jet-propel their offspring over the heads of contemporaries in life’s queue and get them thigh to thigh with the ruling classes. They look at Carole Middleton, the former air hostess whose daughter married the Prince of Wales – by way of Marlborough College – and they think, “I, too, could be mum to a princess!”

I freely admit I am borderline deranged on this topic, but I’ve long felt there’s no area where the great British taste for both oneupmanship and hypocrisy flourishes more flagrantly than within the state school divide.

I live in Cambridge, where I’ve sent my sons to local state schools because – call me a communist! – I believe it’s good for children to be educated within their community alongside contemporaries of all backgrounds and abilities. Also, I’d have to sell my house and rent to send them privately, which strikes me as sheer stupidity when so many state schools are now ranked good or outstanding by Ofsted.

Nevertheless, many of the city’s devout leftie academics apparently don’t agree and have sent their children to the exclusive Perse or Leys schools.