Doing the Right Thing

Well, here's a surprise: Ruth Kelly, a former education secretary who is in an excellent position to understand the effects of nine years of New Labour on the education system, has decided to have her child privately educated at a school which "grooms children with a particular, relatively common condition for entry into elite public schools such as Harrow and Winchester". Ruth Kelly claimed today that she was "doing the right thing". Evidently this is news.

As a member of an outstandingly intrusive and authoritarian government, she is naturally much concerned for her own privacy: "Bringing up children in the public eye is never easy," she said, although the condition of her children has not, to the best of my knowledge, been splashed across the front of the Daily Mail as part of a campaign to cut her salary or throw her out of the country. The school will charge fifteen thousand pounds a year, but in order to avoid the indignity of the means test Kelly "will not seek the help of the local authority in meeting these costs". Dashed decent of her.