'Exclusive: Leftwing MP's marriage split over son's place at grammar school,' bellowed the front page, promising much more on pages 8 and 9. And there was a bonus: the MP in question was Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North since 1983 and about as unreconstructed a beard-and-sandals leftwinger as New Labour endures.
Closer reading of the tale revealed that Corbyn and his Chilean wife, Claudia, had actually separated quietly two years ago. But there was more. The Mail's enquiries into 11-year-old Benjamin's schooling yielded an explanatory statement: the dispute over schools had contributed to the break-up of the Corbyns' marriage, it explained.
Few Labour MPs dashing around the Westminster corridors yesterday actually believed that Queen Elizabeth's grant-maintained boys school in Barnet was the root cause of the split, except one who quipped: 'I bet she did it to get rid of Jeremy.' But passions ran high. 'If my wife sent our kids to a private school I'd have walked out on her,' thundered one leftwinger. 'It's as important as that. You have to stay in the system.' A few minutes later, another leftwing MP, a friend of the first one, veered the other way: 'Let's face it, Jeremy's a toff, just trying to be prolier than thou. It's all about symbols, this stuff, I hate it. But if I lived in Islington I wouldn't send my kids to its bloody schools.' Both views - and several in between - can easily be found in Labour's ranks.
Needless to say, the first MP represented a provincial university town with good state schools and teachers. The second understood from first hand the dilemmas and temptations which afflict progressive middle-class parents in London more than any other British city. How do you square your commitment to equal educational opportunity with your parental desire to do your best by the kids? For many MPs it is an argument about betrayal of one class by another.
Jim Fitzpatrick, an east London MP married to a teacher and a parent governor of his own two children's comprehensive, stresses how vital it is to build a mixed social base. 'If you don't have a mixed community, you don't get the influence of middle-class parents to impose better standards, to help heads who're working so hard against the problems of deprivation.' Fitzpatrick makes another crucial point. 'East London schools have underperformed for years and it's not because the kids are any less bright or able, it's about not having a place to do their homework and it's about parental ambition.' But another politician, a passionate defender of local schools, admitted that if his wife had insisted on private schools, she would probably have got her way. 'Though I can't imagine her coming to that conclusion,' he added.
That brings in another dimension. Friends of Harriet Harman, who was virtually lynched for sending young Harry out of Peckham to a grammar in Bromley, have heard her say that women usually take these tough family decisions, implying that male politicians can keep their hands clean. And it is not hard to find MPs, Tottenham's Bernie Grant was one, who have followed their principles and wondered if they have done right by the kids. Even David Blunkett (sent to a state boarding school for blind boys) has occasionally asked himself the same question.
Of course, Tory MPs were having a whale of a time yesterday. 'You have a choice, either you act hypocritically or you damage your children,' said one with gusto.
Last month it was revealed that Treasury minister Patricia Hewitt (whose father is that rare creature, an Australian knight) uses a GM school and that Baroness Symons, the Foreign Office minister, has a boy at St Paul's, recently rated Britain's top-performing private school, a £9,000-a-year-plus habit.
Coincidentally, St Paul's is Harman's old school. But those were the days when progressives, especially metropolitan upper middle-class progressives, gave little thought to the ideological purity of their choice. Harold Wilson's boys went to University College School in Hampstead with no fuss in the 60s. So did other cabinet kids.
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn (as he then was) started out sending his first-born to the school his own father (also a Labour minister) had sent him to: 500-year-old Westminster, a stone's throw from the Commons. He then switched them to Holland Park comprehensive, a highly fashionable school of the period with a diverse catchment area. Like many such ideologically correct options it has since had a chequered career and underlines an enduring, under-reported feature of the battle that estate agents are as important as Ofsted. Parents can spend more moving house to get into a good state catchment area than they might otherwise spend on private school fees.
In the 60s, Tony Crosland, a graduate of Highgate School and Oxford himself, promised to get rid of all those 'fucking grammar schools' when he was education secretary. With Margaret Thatcher's help (1970-74), he nearly did. In the late 70s Labour drove most of the old direct grant schools into the private sector, some of them modest, some grandees like Manchester Grammar.
They came back as GM schools, of course, and Tony Blair's boys attend one of the best known of the breed, the Oratory in West London, also several miles from his old home in Islington. Labour in office in the 90s is torn. 'Standards, not structures' is David Blunkett's (and Blair's) cry. But they know how deeply the party feels. So the government is changing GMs into Foundation schools, no longer funded direct from Whitehall. It has promised local ballots to decide the fate of the grammars. A truce prevails, but it is an uneasy one.
At the height of the row over Harriet Harman's choice of an opted-out although nominally non-selective school for her sons, a friend ran into her on the edge of a cold and windswept football pitch where one of the boys was playing in a match. Harman, white-faced and stricken, said, 'I've just lost the next election, haven't I?' Some of her colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party thought so, but John Smith (no problem for his bonny girls in Morningside, Edinburgh) knew the significance of the symbolism and kept her in the Shadow Cabinet despite the critics who voted her out. Blair did the same.
For in education more than almost anything else, the personal is political. Not just for Labour politicians either. Ken Clarke (who won a scholarship to Nottingham High), was told by Mrs T that he must go to the Department for Education. He was asked why the Cabinet egghead William Waldegrave couldn't go instead. 'Because he went to Eton,' came the brisk reply. Thatcher sent her own son to Harrow. Much good did it do him.
But this is the youngest government of the 20th century, with a Prime Minister and a dozen or more ministers still taking crucial decisions about where their kids go to school at 11. It is a government elected on the mantra of 'education, education, education'. Many of its most high-profile members live with their families in inner London, at the heart of a system synonymous with apparent failure.
In the Blairs' old borough of Islington, fewer than a quarter of GCSE pupils get five or more A-C grades. The English average is 46.3% and at Queen Elizabeth's in Barnet the figure if 88%. School choices and SATs results haunt many more bedrooms and breakfast tables than the Corbyns'.
One minister, for example, has step-children who went to one of London's most high-flying private schools while her own children are at inner London schools. Others, like Jack Straw, simply send their kids across borough boundaries, although when the now education minister, Margaret Hodge, did so while she was leader of Islington Borough Council (her kids went into Camden) there was uproar.
Health minister Paul Boateng sends one child to a private school (so does another smart black politician, a thoroughly unapologetic Trevor Phillips, candidate for London's Mayor).
But a (childless) London-based government whip said yesterday he would respect any parent's desire to put the kids first. 'Look at the way Neil Kinnock defended Denis Healey after he was attacked for getting his wife Edna private health treatment. He said, 'How can you look at yourself in the mirror when your principles force your wife to suffer physical pain?' Conservative critics should pause before throwing mud. Their governments manage the state system, which accounts for 93% of all secondary places, but most of their kids still go elsewhere. William Hague's comprehensive school education may reflect the future, but in the last cabinet only Tony Newton and Sir George Young, himself an Old Etonian, stuck to the state system.
