Grammar school girls like me know why Mrs May is in this mess

Of all the emotions Brexit has roused in me, the most surprising has been nostalgia for my school days – and not just because I wouldn’t have passed a vote of no confidence among my peers.

In particular, history A-level. I was determined that I was going to get an A (then the highest grade). So I was taken aback when my teachers said that, actually, they didn’t think I could achieve top marks and predicted me a C. Not a cliff-edge scenario, but enough to deter my top choice university from making an offer.

I was furious. Who were they to tell me what I couldn’t do? So, like any good grammar-school girl, I put my head down, ploughed on, ignored my detractors and got that A.

This, I think, explains a lot about the Prime Minister’s attitude in the face of what is now almost certain defeat in the Commons. She might have lost the support of many of her own MPS and seen her Government become the first in history to be held in contempt of Parliament, but still she plugs away – insistent that hers is the best deal for Britain.

Like me, Theresa May is the product of an all-girls grammar (she went to Holton Park in Oxfordshire). Like me, she was forged in the fire of “strong and reliable”. And there are certain truths that only we grammar-school girls know.

First, having passed the entrance exam, we are considered terribly bright. From the moment we set foot in the classroom, our existence is based on having done well enough to be there – when the truth is that we were probably tutored in the dark arts of parroting the right information to pass.

We masquerade as ambitious, confident types, but that often hides a sense of inadequacy at our middle-of-the-road education. Unlike the kids at the comp, we never hone a natural sense of bolshiness or banter (the naughtiest we get is running through fields of wheat). Yet neither are we “posh” enough to have gone private, with smaller classes and a greater capacity for independent thought.

It’s an uncomfortable place to be: trapped between two schools, struggling to shake off the label slapped on you by a selective education.

Perhaps that’s why we take comfort in staying inside the lines drawn by parents and teachers. I hesitate to generalise: Margaret Thatcher was the exception. But typically, we are bred to be unquestioning. We get on with homework, without thinking to interrogate it. We want to be “good girls” – our self-worth having been rooted in academic achievement from day one, when we passed that 11-plus. My school motto was “Serve God and be cheerful”, for crying out loud.

Little wonder that

Mrs May, faced with the challenge of negotiating Brexit, is sticking to the script. She doesn’t know any other way. Heck, she doesn’t even know how to negotiate; grammarschool girls “do” – they don’t debate. Nor do they create a scene. How telling I found her admission in the Commons this week that, if she had banged the table or walked out, “some might say I had done a better job”. Instead, she added: “I focused on getting a deal… and I did so through painstaking hard work.”

But politics is not a meritocracy. The hardest worker does not necessarily get to remain head girl – a reality check for grammar-school alumni everywhere.