Sadly, the 10-year-old Keir Starmer does not seem to have been the sort of child who thought ahead. A more cautious – or prophetic – boy would surely have refused to attend Reigate grammar, or even deliberately failed his 11-plus, on the off-chance that grammars would be one day abolished, his school being among those that became independent and his attendance used, some 50 years later, to defend tax breaks for private schools.
That young Starmer did not now inspires his more desperate critics to detect “the stench of hypocritical class envy” in Labour’s plan to remove the charitable status that confers on private schools, among other tax benefits, exemption from VAT valued at £1.7bn.
