ANOTHER VOICE
I rang the Chancellor and asked him to explain himself but he was watching football
BORIS JOHNSON
War is terrible. War is hell. War makes a man do unaccustomed things, lashing out to protect his children and his loved ones. And in the great class war of May 2000, launched by Labour with all the trickery and viciousness of Pearl Harbor, I have already allowed my emotions to get the better of me. You and I know that Gordon Brown was guilty of gross cheating in the matter of poor Laura Spence and her admission to Oxford. We all know the facts — that Laura was good, but five others, including two from the state system, three women, and two from ethnic minorities, were better. After a week of blow and counter-blow, Gordon's position °light to have been annihilated; and in truth II has now been accepted by most commen- tators that the government's treatment of the affair is, in the words of Kingsley Am is, an inverted pyramid of piss arising from a lie.
What I wondered, though, as I rocked with rage, was whether anyone had yet done enough to confront the Chancellor with his mendacity. And that is why, on finding Myself alone the other night, with Mr Brown's home telephone number before kine, I decided to see what he had to say for " iniself. Why did he say that she had A- ' I evels, when she had none? Why was it an `absolute scandal' that one of those five other candidates had been admitted, and not Laura? What the hell was he up to, setting himself up as the great national tutor for admissions? Wasn't he ashamed to be stir- ring up this pointless, debilitating, zero-sum warfare between private and state educa- tion? Did he mean it? Was it a gaffe? thWould he perhaps like to apologise to all c's,e of us who are now in agonies of indeci- i:rn t Should we keep our children in their ti; Islington Sinksbury Schools, and so save when from government-inspired stigma nen it comes to university admissions, or the We continue to get up at the crack in 'elide hope of buying them the best possible Cohere education? For perhaps half an hour I sat muttering. Then I could take it no t,Ilger, and like a tarantula my hand sprang home. 'Hello,' said a Scottish voice, after wa:Tirings. I explained my business. There scene. Perhaps he was in the middle of cook- ru0 up some new tax, sitting there in his drifinji((.-like kitchen in Dunfermline town, mg the bluid-red wine. But no, he was watching the Scotland-Northern Ireland match and, while our conversation was cor- dial, I had the impression that he did not wish to prolong it.
`Ha ha ha, Boris,' said the man who only a week ago was happy to shoot his mouth off about Laura Spence, and her ego-bashing experience in applying to Oxford, 'I'm cer- tainly not going to talk to you now.' B-b-b- but look, I said, trying to convey something of the hurt of many people I know, who think Gordon Brown has been not bad, as Labour chancellors go, and who cannot understand what he is playing at. This Laura business, I said: was it a scandal or wasn't it? `Ha ha ha,' said Gordon, more mellifluously than ever, and advised that I should fix to interview him 'in the normal way'; and so you can imagine, when our dialogue finished several seconds later, with mutual expres- sions of esteem, that my frustration was redoubled. Would no one speak for the gov- ernment? Was Gordon Brown to be allowed to tell a series of untruths about one girl's admission to university, whip up a class war, and then loll back and watch the football?
So I rang Malcolm Wicks, the minister for higher education, who was also at home, and took out my feelings on him. Mr Wicks will go far in politics, and deserves a medal for waffle. Time after time I invited him to defend the Chancellor's hysterical views about Laura Spence. He refused. Was it a scandal that she was turned down, I asked him. 'I can't say that.' Should some other candidate have been taken instead of Laura Spence? 'I'm not in the business of second- guessing interviews.' Should Laura have got into Magdalen, Mr Wicks? Yes or no? 'I am not in a position to make a judgment on that.' But Gordon Brown thinks he can make a judgment on it. Why can't you? 'We've been through all that. It's time to move on.' No, I said, I'm damned if I'm going to move on. Labour started it. It was Laura Spence's headmaster who put this story into the public domain. It was Gordon Brown who decided to turn it into a national 'scandal'.
'75p for your thoughts. ' It was utterly sickening that Labour should now blame Oxford for releasing details about the girl's failure, when the gov- ernment gave the university no choice but to defend itself. It was now clear to the world, and, it seemed, to Mr Wicks, if not to the Chancellor, that the tutors of Magdalen had a wholly credible case for saying no to Laura Spence. And if, as he admitted, her case was not really infamous, then what in the name of holy flip was he saying? Well, he just felt that private schools, with their greater resources, had an advantage over state schools in the preparation of candidates for interview. He agreed that Oxbridge had already done rather a lot to redress the bal- ance in favour of the state-school entrant, not least by abolishing the written exam; he agreed that tutors did their best in the inter- view — the only utensil they have left — to coax out signs of talent. But he just felt the figures were not good enough. Not that he was in favour of a quota system, mind you. He just . . . he just . . . .
Oh I don't know what he wanted, and of course it is unfair to tax a junior minister with a rash outburst from the Chancellor. But I put down the phone more disgusted by the cheapness and cynicism of this gov- ernment than at any time since Tony Blair called for Glenn Hoddle to be sacked for his views on reincarnation. Heaven knows what they are playing at. Perhaps Gordon — an Edinburgh graduate — is bashing Oxford as a way of bashing the Fettes-and- Oxford-educated Blair. Perhaps they think the Labour 'heartlands' will he impressed (though it seems a bit odd, frankly, to call for more state-school candidates to be admitted to Oxbridge, while simultaneously calling on the Foreign Office and other bodies to change their pro-allegedly Oxbridge bias).
In a way, I wish it was all just grandstand- ing. The trouble is, when you look at the Higher Education Funding Council, and the way money for universities is increasingly tied to admitting members of this or that favoured group, you can see that Labour is genuinely committed to social engineering. They will cause more resentment than they can possibly cure. They must he put off. If any parent feels his or her child has been unfairly treated, I suggest you call Gordon Brown on 020-7270 1823 (offices and tell him either to take up the case, or else to put a sock in it.
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