Anyone who questions how much of a leg-up a public school education can give a young man should pay special heed to the remarkable tale of Brendan Bracken, an Irishman born in 1901 to a builder who strongly supported the Republican cause. His father died when he was three, and the young Bracken proved ungovernable, getting into fights and eventually running away from school. After a sketchy education, his mother sent him to Australia for work. But three years later Bracken returned to Britain determined to make something of himself.
At the age of nineteen he turned up at Sedbergh, a public school in Cumbria, at the same time as my grandfather, where he convinced the headmaster that he was fifteen years old and that his family had sent him to England to enrol. The school asked few questions, especially after he handed over the full fees, money he had earned from manual work in Australia but which he claimed had been left to him by his parents who had died in a bushfire. He further boosted his society credentials by falsely claiming to be a close relation of Montagu Rendell, the then Winchester College headmaster.
A year later, in 1921, he left Sedbergh with a History prize and a genuine foothold on Britain’s rigid class ladder. On the basis of his Sedbergh connections he was offered teaching posts at other public schools, including the highly respected Bishop’s Stortford College in Hertfordshire. The contacts he made at school and the gentleman’s education he received opened the doors to English society. In fact, he was so convincing as a public school gentleman that he inveigled his way into the inner sanctum of the Conservative Party, which selected him as candidate for North Paddington in the 1929 general election.
But his greatest feat of social climbing was to befriend Winston Churchill, later proving himself so invaluable to the prime minister that he was appointed minister of information during the Second World War and then first lord of the Admiralty. The two men became so close that their relationship gave rise to rumours that Bracken was Churchill’s secret son. Bracken’s mysterious arrival at the heart of the British establishment aroused a great deal of suspicion but each time he was challenged he was able to suppress questions by citing people he had actually met at Sedbergh. His secret life and the fraud he perpetrated on English society only emerged after his death in 1957.1
*
On 5 July 1945 the same public sentiment which had forced Churchill to find valuable government time to address the public school problem voted the victorious war leader and his loyal servant Bracken out of office. In a whopping defeat for the Conservatives, given the recent victory in Europe, Labour won a 146-seat majority. Churchill, who could be forgiven for succumbing to a bout of post-victory complacency, gravely misjudged the national mood by suggesting that for a socialist government to succeed in its ambitious reform programme it would need the help of the Gestapo.
The militarisation of British society had forced privately educated soldiers, sailors and airmen to rub shoulders with the lower classes. Britain’s time-honoured but arbitrary social divisions were sharply exposed and, after five years of universal suffering, much harder to justify. Prime Minister Clement Attlee wasted no time in founding a new socialist nation fit for returning heroes of all classes. His government delivered to the letter on its welfare state manifesto, creating the National Health Service and nationalising a fifth of the economy including the coal and steel industries, the railways and the Bank of England.
Attlee’s cabinet achieved all this with the fewest number of privately educated cabinet ministers (one in four) in British history and many who came from genuinely poor backgrounds. Surely now under a Labour-led administration the days of the public schools were numbered.
The minister with the most authentic working-class credentials was Ellen Wilkinson, born into a family of Manchester cotton workers. After persevering with her education (at home and at state school) she went to university before securing a job as an officer with the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Wilkinson’s socialist standing was further strengthened by her high-profile participation in the Jarrow March and several visits to the Spanish Civil War. She made no secret of her communist affiliations, stating that ‘we shall have only one class in this country, the working class’. After pledging her allegiance to the Labour Party she was elected as MP for Middlesbrough East, the only woman Labour member at the 1924 general election.
When Attlee came to choose his 1945 cabinet Wilkinson was a shoo-in in for minister of education. Wilkinson, the only woman in the cabinet, made a radical education reform programme her priority. Her first task was to implement the 1944 Education Act, which would bring free education to all and the abolition of school fees at state-run schools. It wasn’t enough that socially disadvantaged children should be educated for free – she also wanted to open up the public schools to working-class children. A key proposal to come out of the Fleming Report, which had been excluded from the Education Act, was for public schools to provide government-funded boarding for a quarter of their pupils. Wilkinson was determined to make sure the public schools, which had done so much to water down the final report, would at least honour this commitment.
However, it was not to be. Wilkinson became embroiled in the doomed plot of Herbert Morrison, with whom she had begun an affair, to overthrow Attlee and replace him as Labour leader.2 She worked tirelessly to achieve her lover’s dream while Morrison, grandfather of New Labour politician Peter Mandelson, refused to publicly acknowledge their relationship. Two years later in 1947, convinced she and Morrison had no future, she took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates. Morrison didn’t even attend her funeral.3
With Wilkinson dead there was no one left to champion the public school free places measure. Certainly, Attlee himself had no appetite for a fight with the public schools. Indeed, despite the low number of privately educated ministers in the 1945 cabinet, Attlee’s government soon returned to the Old School Tie order.
Attlee had been educated at Northaw School, a boys’ preparatory school near Pluckley in Kent, and then Haileybury College, a public school in Hertfordshire (and alma mater of Rudyard Kipling, Group Captain Peter Townsend, Quentin Letts, Stephen Mangan, Dom Joly and key aide to Jeremy Corbyn, Barry Gardiner MP. It was while working at Haileybury House, a charity run by his old school to help East End children, that he underwent his conversion to socialism. The shock of how desperate and pathetic life was for so many ordinary people living in London convinced him that the state must be used to help redistribute the nation’s wealth. Today few public schools are involved in this kind of coalface charity work, preferring to make their limited social welfare contribution at arm’s length.
The architect of the welfare state, William Beveridge (Charterhouse), also carried out charitable works in the East End where he attended to the needs of the working classes. After university, Beveridge moved to Toynbee Hall, just down the road from Haileybury House, where he worked with R.H. Tawney to help establish communities that enabled the rich and poor to live more closely together. These so-called settlement houses were located in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class ‘settlement workers’ lived, helping to alleviate the poverty of their low-income neighbours. The houses provided services such as daycare, education and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas.
However, despite Attlee’s commitment to an egalitarian society, neither he nor Beveridge ever saw the need to challenge the public school order. Many Haileyburians, some of whom Attlee knew from his time there, were given ministerial jobs in his first government, while one, Geoffrey de Freitas, became his new parliamentary private secretary. According to David Turner: ‘When Hugh Dalton, one of Attlee’s cabinet colleagues, asked one of them about the general opinion on Attlee’s 1947 ministerial reshuffle, he was told “that it seemed that, to get on in this government, you must have been at Eton, or Haileybury”.’4
In a speech at Haileybury on 28 June 1946, Attlee stated: ‘This country changes, but it is our way to change things gradually, and I see no reason for thinking that the public schools will disappear. I think the great tradition of public schools will be extended.’5 When the Queen made Attlee a Knight of the Garter he chose Haileybury’s winged hearts for his coat of arms.6
*
In the immediate post-war years Britain came close to bankruptcy as the economy faced the twin pressures of war debts and the maintenance of a flagging and expensive empire. LEAs had promised to pick up the bill for public school bursary schemes but in such financially stricken times there was little cash or political will to carry it through. There was also a serious flaw in the Fleming scheme – admission criteria for the publicly funded places were not set centrally, but by the schools themselves. As a proposal it could have never achieved what Wilkinson and others wanted – state control of the public schools. Billy Hughes, Wilkinson’s former parliamentary private secretary, expressed what many feared: that places in public schools under the LEA Fleming scheme would not go to working-class pupils but to middle-class boys and girls who were ‘looking for cheap ways to satisfy their snobbish ambitions’.7
But for a number of public schools these LEA grants represented a valuable lifeline. The best example is Dulwich College, which had been badly bomb-damaged during the war. Faced with financial ruin, the school took full advantage of the free places scheme for 11-plus boys. By the end of the 1940s,8 90 per cent of all Dulwich pupils were in receipt of a local government grant, prompting its headmaster to comment: ‘It is now possible to choose as our entrants the best boys, quite regardless of their father’s income.’ The school had almost brought about a needs-blind admissions policy – something no public school has achieved in the modern era.
In 1950 the Labour Party published a pamphlet which called for universal secondary schools for all children. The way to proceed, argued the pamphlet, was to raise the standard and status of the ordinary schools so that all parents will send their children to them as a matter of course, instead of sending them to private schools.9 But before any progress could be made, Labour was out of office, replaced by Winston Churchill’s Conservative government of 1951.
The public schools had once again escaped state intervention. Yet only a few years later the politicians educated at these elite schools found themselves badly out of step with the national and international mood. When it came to Anthony Eden, the effortlessly suave aristocratic son of a baronet, Britain had a prime minister more reminiscent of Georgian times than the nuclear age.
Eden’s great-grandfather was William Iremonger, commander of the 2nd Regiment of Foot during the Peninsular War, fighting under Wellington at the Battle of Vimeiro. His illustrious ancestry included Barbara Villiers, a mistress of Charles II, whose famous descendants include Princess Diana, the Mitford sisters, former Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers, and even Churchill. Eden was educated at two public schools: Sandroyd School in Cobham and Eton, where he won a Divinity prize, excelled at cricket, rugby and rowing, and gained membership to the highly coveted Eton ‘Pop’ society whose membership is chosen by the senior pupils. In the First World War he was awarded a Military Cross for bravery after helping to rescue a sergeant from no-man’s land. In the next war he was Foreign Secretary under Churchill and emerged at the end of the conflict with his own sense of self-belief intact and a contender for the leadership of the Tory Party.
As prime minister, Eden had the distinction of overseeing the lowest unemployment figures of the post-Second World War era – just over 215,000, barely 1 per cent of the workforce, in July 1955. But Eden had little interest in domestic affairs and instead focused on the world stage where he believed posterity would judge him. And his own inflated sense of importance in the world matched that of his country. In 1956 Suez was the diplomatic calamity that exposed the myth of British foreign power and the ruling class that believed in it. Without consulting the Americans, Britain and France invaded Egypt to protect their trade lines. When America objected, Eden realised he had critically misunderstood the new world order, leaving him no choice but to carry out a humiliating volte-face. It was not just an embarrassment for Eden, who had to resign for lying to parliament about what he had known of the military operation, but raised questions about the accountability of public school government (Eden’s entire cabinet was privately educated and of private means). However, for those in charge of England’s public schools, the Suez crisis was merely evidence of how well ‘Eton government’ was working. After addressing a working-men’s club in the East End of London, Eton headmaster Robert Birley said: ‘I pointed out to them that while people thought of the Suez policy of the Government as an “Eton” policy, because of the number of Etonians in the Cabinet, they had not recognised that both the junior members of the Government who resigned and the majority of the “dissident” Conservatives were Old Etonians. I said that what we wanted to do at Eton was to produce men who would hold independent views and be prepared to stick up for them, not men who would take an “Etonian” line.’10
Seven years later, another Conservative administration suffered a similar fate in 1963 when a privately educated politician lied to parliament about his personal life. John Profumo (Harrow), a leading member of Oxford University’s exclusive Bullingdon Club, enjoyed an active sex life outside his marriage. One of his lovers was the model Christine Keeler, who had also begun an affair with a Russian naval attaché. At the time, Profumo was secretary of state for war and the potential threat to national security was obvious. When Profumo was confronted about the allegations in parliament he denied the story. But he was later forced to admit the truth and, more significantly, that he had lied to the House of Commons, an unforgiveable breach of trust. The resulting scandal is credited with the early resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. But Profumo’s dishonourable behaviour and the ensuing cover-up dealt a terminal blow to the country’s trust in the establishment. It also marked the end of deference to the public school politician.
Yet none of this translated into any real change in the status quo. Despite all the post-war progress in welfare reform and advancement in technology, Britain’s class system remained as rigid as it was before the start of the war. The higher echelons of government and the country’s great estates remained controlled by a narrow class whose entry was still determined by the public school system. The post-war baby boom also meant there were more children to educate from all classes.
In the next decade public schools enjoyed something of a revival, mostly minor public schools reinventing themselves to attract more fee-paying pupils. Heads were reporting waiting lists for places at the top schools stretching to the end of the 1970s.11 Snob value was back in business.
It was also the Golden Age of the grammar school, with children from poorer backgrounds being funded by government grants to attend otherwise fee-paying schools. The modern grammar school had been established by the 1944 Education Act to educate 25 per cent of the state school population, with admissions strictly determined by the 11-plus exam. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s there were around 170 direct-grant grammar schools, aligned with the Headmasters’ Conference, alongside over 1,200 state-maintained grammar schools.12
Among those to benefit from a grammar school scholarship was Margaret Thatcher. The future Tory prime minister attended the then very modern Kesteven & Grantham Girls’ School between 1936 and 1943, which also educated a number of fee-paying pupils.
David Willetts, who was minister for universities and science in David Cameron’s coalition government in 2010, was another benefit from the grammar school movement, attending King Edward’s School, Birmingham, under a direct grant. He followed in the footsteps of Enoch Powell whose family paid school fees. ‘My parents wouldn’t have been able to pay for private education. And almost everyone at KE was there under the grant system. It was an independent foundation and, when Labour tried to abolish grammar schools, it went back to being a fully independent grammar school [a private school without government funding]. The outgoing headmaster John Claughtoun would argue that we ended up with a greater social and ethnic mix than some of the independent schools.’13
Willetts, chair of the Resolution Foundation, also believes that the direct-grant system helped to boost social mobility at the time: ‘In the nineteenth century, Birmingham grew as this huge industrial town and King Edward’s could have just become more and more socially selective. But the city fathers, who were very closely connected to their school, rightly [deciding against social exclusion] said “well, we need more schools”. So they created this King Edward foundation, which by the twentieth century had seven schools within it: the original school, plus a girls’ school, plus five grammar schools.’ Willetts argues that ‘a lot of the original charitable foundations that have become private schools could have taken a different route, they could have become grammar schools. But King Edward’s took the route of expanding as the demand for British education expanded. And good on them for doing so. The others became a lot more socially selective.’
The grammar school experiment had a profound impact on social mobility, lifting some children from ordinary backgrounds to influential positions in society and challenging the public school hegemony. But while the grammar school and direct-grant system greatly benefited less well-off families, like the Willetts, who had well-supported and motivated children, the vast majority had to make do with a bog-standard secondary modern. Instead of bridging the divide between good and bad education in England and Wales, grammar schools were exacerbating it. While a few clever working-class kids escaped their poor career prospects, the life chances of 11-plus failures were more dismal than ever.
The journalist Cassandra Jardine (Godolphin & Latymer) describes in vivid detail the plight of the two-thirds of the population who were sent to the local secondary modern school: ‘They were housed in decaying buildings, taught by often unqualified teachers, given only a third of the funding per head of their contemporaries at grammar schools and barred from public exams. The middle classes feared the system, lest their children should fail the 11-plus; the working classes saw it as a way to keep them in their place. Many emerged with no qualifications – only the top stream took CSEs – to become factory fodder.’
In 1964 Harold Wilson came to power promising to end the education apartheid and finally deal with the public school problem. Labour was committed to a comprehensive education system that would also do away with selective grammar schools which gave preferential treatment to a self-selecting stratum of society. The creation of a national network of comprehensive schools was given priority. But members of the hard-left also saw abolition of public schools as a prerequisite for community education.
It fell to Anthony Crosland, the new education minister, to honour the manifesto pledge to set up a commission ‘to advise on the best way of integrating the public schools into the state system’.
Crosland very well understood the English public school system. He was educated at Highgate public school in north London and on his second marriage to the American writer Susan Catling he became stepfather to her two daughters who were both being privately educated, the eldest at St Paul’s in London, with fees paid by Catling’s father. Catling later wrote: ‘Nature ensures that an elite is always asserting itself in a democracy, but the state should do its utmost, Tony said, to make it possible for those without money or position or a literate family background to have equal access to the opportunity that a decent education bestows.’14
In his hugely influential book The Future of Socialism, Crosland argued that: ‘This [system of superior private schools] is much the most flagrant inequality of opportunity, as it is cause of class inequality generally, in our educational system; and I have never been able to understand why socialists have been so obsessed with the question of the grammar schools, and so indifferent to the much more glaring injustice of the independent schools.’
Catling recalled how her husband frequently debated with his eldest stepdaughter, Sheila, his ideas about democratic socialism:
At first she was taken aback by the moral concept that children should not inherit large sums of money earned by others. She thought of her piggy bank, how nice it would be if someone filled it nightly. But Tony was a good teacher. He explained the reasons for urging privileged children to attend comprehensive schools: ‘Of course St Paul’s gives you a better academic education, but my own view is that if a girl brought up in a home with books has academic potential, she’ll develop it whether or not she goes to an intensely academic school. I daresay the headmistress of St Paul’s holds a different view. Much of the argument hangs on how you define education. Some would argue that a comprehensive school offers the privileged girl better preparation for the real world, though admittedly that’s not the purpose of comprehensives.’
His argument made a profound impression, as Sheila later asked if she could go to Holland Park Comprehensive.
I called on the headmistress of St Paul’s, who told me we were using Sheila as a political pawn, but that it probably didn’t matter too much as she was ‘rather wet’.
‘In what sense?’ I inquired.
‘She never wants to play sports.’
Later Sheila’s younger daughter followed her sister to Holland Park. Around the same time, the left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn (Westminster) and his American wife were having similar misgivings about the private education of their four children. They too were removed from private schools and educated at Holland Park.15
In 1965 Crosland announced to the House of Commons that the government was determined public schools ‘should, like other parts of the education system, become progressively open to boys and girls irrespective of the income of their parents; that the schools should move towards a wider range of academic attainment, so that the public school sector may increasingly play its own part in the national movement towards comprehensive education; and, in particular, that the schools should seek to meet any unsatisfied need for boarding education amongst wider sections of the population.’ Unsurprisingly, it met stiff resistance from the obvious quarters. The shadow Tory home secretary Quintin Hogg (Eton) reminded Crosland that there was ‘unsatisfied demand for boarding education’ and that the public schools had ‘distinguished academic records’.16
Establishment of the Public Schools Commission was delayed until 1965, partly because of cabinet agenda prioritisation but also because of the controversial nature of the topic. In fact, the chairmanship came to be seen as ‘education’s most unwanted post of 1965’.17 The first five people to be offered the job turned it down, before Sir John Newsom, a former chief education officer in Hertfordshire, accepted the position.
Newsom was a pillar of the public school community. He had gone to Imperial Service College, was a lifelong governor of Haileybury and Imperial Service College (the two schools merged) and sat on the Independent Schools Tribunal. But the commission was regarded as being ‘carefully but firmly weighted in favour of change’ and faced considerable distrust from the outset.18 For the education reformers, there was renewed cause for optimism which appeared to be well founded.
The commission proposed for a cadre of ‘suitable’ integrated independent boarding schools which, within seven years, would assign at least half of their places to pupils from maintained schools. And crucially, this new influx of state pupils should not be excluded from the schools on ‘grounds of low academic ability’. The scheme was to be run by a new Boarding Schools Corporation, and the costs of tuition were to be covered by LEAs on a pooled basis, partially reimbursed by the exchequer. The remaining costs would be dealt with on a means-tested basis, with parents contributing where they were deemed able to afford it.19 Additionally, public schools would be expected to become more co-educational with ‘extended opportunities of boarding education for girls’. The commissioners also called for an end to ‘fagging’ (though many public schools had by now abolished personal fagging), ‘eccentric or archaic dress that flaunts class difference’ and compulsory participation in the Combined Cadet Force.20
Under this programme there would be 47,000 boarding places (38,000 at secondary level and 9,000 at primary level) at around 350 secondary schools and an unspecified number of schools catering for children of primary or preparatory age by 1980. The estimated cost to the taxpayer would be no more than £12 million a year and this could be reduced further if the government chose to abolish the charitable status of independent schools. If the wealthiest parents were also made to pay fees, the cost would be negligible. This was not, however, a majority conclusion as four members of the commission gave dissenting opinions and four more formally expressed discontent with the main recommendations.
The public schools complained of the report’s ‘doctrinaire rigidity, its woolliness of thought, and its avoidance of some main problems’.21 Nevertheless, their greatest fear was abolition and so, publicly at least, they supported some kind of reform. In private they may have cynically noted that the downturn in the late 1960s economy made state funding an attractive financial solution to their short-term problems.
Labour having dug its heels in on the issue, many MPs expected radical action to follow. It did not. The truth was that Labour was divided over how to implement the commission’s recommendations and lacked the political will to grasp the bull by the horns.22 Even the majority recommendation to remove tax advantages from independent schools registered as charities found little favour in Westminster and Whitehall. Some ministers had misgivings about the final cost; others believed a massive overhaul of the education system was bound to count against them at the polls. Many of Labour’s privately educated ministers were also far from committed to the comprehensive cause.
While Crosland’s stepchildren were educated in line with his political beliefs, Attlee, Wilson and Jim Callaghan all sent their children to public schools without causing any controversy in the party.23 Indeed, the Labour MP Hartley Shawcross (Dulwich) had claimed in 1956 that he did not know ‘a single member of the Labour Party, who can afford to do so, who does not send his children to a public school, often at great sacrifice’.24 Shawcross sent his own son, William, to Eton – he went on to head the Charity Commission, which regulates Eton and all the other public schools which claim charitable status. The father of Tory minister Ed Vaizey25 had served on the same commission with the headmaster of St Paul’s while he was looking for a suitable school to educate his son. John Vaizey had been vociferous in his opposition to the public schools while he served on the commission. But it later emerged that he was so impressed by the headmaster of St Paul’s and his school that he decided to send Vaizey junior there.26
Any prospect of reform ended with the election of Ted Heath’s Conservative government in June 1970. Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, says that the Tory manifesto comprehensively buried the prospect of change by including a single sentence supporting the right of parents to choose independent education.27 Later the same year, the secretary of state for education and science, Margaret Thatcher, was asked in the House of Commons ‘what action she now proposes to take on the reports of the Public Schools Commission’. Her reply was succinct and unequivocal: ‘None, sir.’ Hillman recalls the following year she told pupils at Bloxham School in Oxfordshire: ‘Please never apologise for independence. It is worth stimulating and nurturing for its own sake. You do not have to justify it. It is those who wish to finish it who have to justify their case.’28
Even the removal of the public school charitable tax exemption, the one Newsom recommendation which had enjoyed a consensus among commission members, was consigned to the ‘too difficult’ basket. Ministers had taken legal advice and wrongly concluded that such a move might be used to deprive genuine charities such as Oxfam of their own charitable tax advantage. And so yet again public opinion had cried out for change, the government had produced a report, its conclusions watered down by vested interests, and the feeblest of reforms was ignored.
Labour’s turmoil over public schools continued throughout the 1970s. When the party returned to government in 1974 it was principally occupied with putting out the fires of economic downturn and industrial unrest. However, the reformers had one final hand to play.
In 1975 they forced direct-grant schools, which were funded by the state and fee-paying pupils, to choose between becoming LEA-maintained comprehensives or independents without a grant. Labour ministers calculated that few of these schools would risk giving up such a valuable source of state income. But it was a gamble that badly backfired: by picking off the low-hanging fruit for short-term political gains, Labour had cut the grammar school sector adrift. Less than 30 per cent of the remaining direct-grant grammar schools became comprehensives, while over one hundred, generally large, academically selective and high-performing schools joined the public school sector. Instead of widening access, these schools returned to serving wealthy elites.29
*
Direct-grant places had been popular with Tory MPs who recognised that grammar schools were the one system that had given poor, hard-working families a chance to get to the top. Others, like Margaret Thatcher herself, resented the public schoolboys who took their birthrights and privileges for granted. So in 1980 the Conservative Party set about bringing back a form of direct grant under an initiative which would provide funding for the education of a few poor, bright students at the top public schools.
Between 1980 and 1997, more than 75,000 children from state schools benefited from the assisted-places scheme (though some of the parents managed to overcome the means-testing barrier by creative accounting). Eighty per cent of these students went on to attend university, with 15.6 per cent ending up at an elite institution like Oxford or Cambridge. By 2012, four out of ten assisted-place pupils were earning £90,000 a year or more and even those who didn’t go to university were in solidly middle-class occupations with a good income. Tellingly, more than half went on to send their own children to public schools.30
But even in the supposedly classless ‘loadsamoney’ 1980s the scheme had its critics. John Rae, the Westminster headmaster and leading light of the public school movement, spoke out against it: ‘You do not deal with a famine by sending a few lucky children to lunch at the Ritz.’
Yet into the 1980s the pendulum had swung so far away from reform of public schools that Margaret Thatcher even countenanced outright privatisation of the state education system. In 1982 the prime minister and her chancellor Geoffrey Howe were behind a politically toxic move to dismantle the welfare state. The proposals considered by her cabinet included compulsory charges for schooling and introducing full-cost university tuition fees. One of those who worked on the Central Policy Review Staff paper was Lord Wasserman, who would later become David Cameron’s adviser on crime and policing. In the paper, Wasserman, who was educated in Canada, suggested cutting 25 per cent of state school teachers. Thankfully, the proposals, including the privatisation of the NHS, were leaked to the media and the backlash was so damaging that Thatcher was forced to abandon the whole scheme.31