Joseph Harman, the 11-year-old son of Harriet Harman, Labour's health spokesman, is a bright boy who deserves to do well. It would be ironic, therefore, if his mother's decision to accede to his wish to attend St Olave's, Bromley, a selective grammar school ten miles from their Southwark home, was to burden him for life with the tag: 'the boy who saved the Tories.'
The mood on the Tory benches when John Major rose to take prime minister's questions on January 23rd suggested that some t that. The Tories do not, of course, object to parental choice. Indeed, they claim to be expanding it by allowing schools to opt out of local-authority control, and by experimenting with a measure of selection. They object to Harman's exercising her choice while apparently backing Labour's opposition to selection. Mr Major took full advantage, and the boys and girls behind him, who have had little to cheer recently, loved it.
Strangely, the row broke at a time when Labour's position on schooling is rather less hypocritical than it has been in the past. Once upon a time, Harold Wilson, the party leader, sent his sons to University College School, North London, a fee-paying school, though his first government set up a royal commission aimed at integrating fee-paying schools into state education. Today, no member of Labour's front bench would dream of sending his or her offspring to a fee-paying school.
Meanwhile, Labour's attachment to the universal virtues of comprehensive schools has weakened. Its policies are still far from clear, but the party is at least planning tough measures to improve standards in bad comprehensives (which include some of those in Ms Harman's borough). Opted-out schools will keep many of their freedoms, though local councils will be allowed to put representatives on their governing bodies and to be consulted on admissions policies. It favours specialist schools, which choose some pupils because of their special aptitudes (for example, for music) and has abandoned dogmatic support for mixed-ability teaching. Even grammar schools, which Anthony Crosland, a Labour education secretary, famously tried and failed to destroy, may survive if local parents vote to keep them.
Most Labour MPs reluctantly accept these new policies. But their gut reactions are hostile to anything that smacks of elitism. Moreover, even MPs who endorse New Labour pragmatism at Westminster often go in fear of Old Labour activists in their constituencies. Whereas Labour activists used to be blue-collar trade unionists, today they are more often teachers of an egalitarian disposition. Even Labour front-benchers were slow to back Ms Harman publicly, some saying one thing to Mr Blair and another behind his back.
Mr Blair believes that parents will sympathise with Ms Harman for doing the right thing by her boy. Still, he recognises that the party has appeared disunited, and that the public may punish it for that in the polls.
Yet Mr Blair's associates claim that good may come out of this row. Mr Blair has no patience with Labour's anti-Harman rebels whose egalitarian educational ideologies, he believes, have contributed to Labour's four successive election defeats. His friends point out that the party will face far tougher issues than the one over Ms Harman, should it win power. If one person's choice of school raises such passions, how will it be if and when a Labour government has to cut education spending? Hence Mr Blair's decision to stand by Ms Harman. Hence the riot act he read to the parliamentary party when it met in the Commons on January 24th to debate the issue. And hence the sheepish faces of the rebels after the meeting.
After a damaging row, New Labour survived the onslaught from Old Labour. But the row has shown that, in education at any rate, the party is not yet Mr Blair's poodle.
