Sorry, but I won’t be saluting the dimmest Cabinet in our history

WHY is it supposed to be a good thing that the new Cabinet are worse-educated than the old one? Half the media trumpeted on Friday that Theresa May’s new Government was full of state-educated Ministers, as if this were a cause for rejoicing.

But why should it be? It is a regrettable fact that this country’s private schools are vastly, incomparably better than all but a very few of its state schools. All figures and results confirm this. All employers know it.

And almost all the good state schools are academically selective grammar schools, a tiny, hugely oversubscribed remnant of survivors, utterly untypical of the state sector. And they must remain a pitiful few dozen, besieged by desperate parents – because it is against the law to open any new ones.

Most of the other good state schools select just as ruthlessly, judging pupils by their parents’ ability to afford expensive houses, or to fake religious belief, or both at once.

So what is there to celebrate about all these new Ministers? Either they have taken advantage of a rare privilege just as unfair as that used by fee-paying parents, and more secret. Or they have been poorly educated and are not going to be very good at their jobs as a result.

This very odd cult of state education among politicians used to be confined to the Labour Party, where the worse the school was, the more virtue points you scored. Private education was a matter of shame. A grammar school education was often concealed. I once caught a Labour MP pretending to have gone to a comprehensive when he hadn’t – because none had existed in his home city at the time. Then, the Tory Party turned into the Labour Party.

The transformation is now complete, which is why the Labour Party is biting its own tail trying to work out what on earth it is for.

And Tory politicians started bragging about sending their children to state schools, as well as looking embarrassed about having been privately educated themselves.

Mrs May seldom mentions her time at a private convent school, and tried for years to keep quiet about her grammar school days, though she now seems to have decided to trade on it as it suits her new image as the woman from Middle England.

But none of this changes the fact that in the 50 years since most grammar schools were abolished, state education in this country has been in decline – and that the continuing existence of private schools has shown it up again and again.

So let’s have no boasting about having the worst-educated Cabinet in modern history.

Instead let’s restore the lost grammar and direct grant schools that were taking on and beating the private schools at their own game, until politicians destroyed them.