I'm a diehard Leftie but my son is going to private school

But over the past decade or so, I've had the opportunity to witness among my peers the reverse as, frightened that their offspring aren't going to make the grade, they've abandoned their principles and pulled out their chequebooks. On Saturday, as I did the tours of a couple of prospective fee-paying schools for my 11-year-old, I reflected bitterly on how it was I'd now made the same miserable traverse. Had I become a hypocrite, still believing in the ideal of universal state education for everyone, but in practice wanting that to be everyone else?

Some Leftiers-than-thou have claimed an exceptionalism of religion Mr & Mrs T Blair or race Ms D Abbott or special needs Ms Ruth Kelly, in order to justify going private. Others have resorted to claiming never to have been that Left-wing in the first place. After all, with the rest of Left-wing ideals so bankrupt, maybe belief in state education as an engine of social change was equally worthless?

Certainly, my son was not getting educated properly at his local state primary. He was spending most of his lessons reading under the edge of the desk, and at 10 was unable to write properly. He was being persistently bullied something the staff felt unable to combat effectively and as a result he had come to hate school with a vengeance. After two terms in a private school with small classes and teachers who aren't so pressured that they "teach to the test", all this has started to turn around.

Why, in such a situation, if I could possibly afford to keep him in the private sector, would I throw him back into the state? Living in Lambeth, where there's a paucity of secondary state places for boys, the options are not good; can I really be prepared to sacrifice him on the altar of my own idealism? Well, no, of course not but nor do I feel particularly like a hypocrite.

I never took the view that state education was an engine of social change that's a function of a more egalitarian economy. No, I don't feel hypocritical just angry. Angry that after more than seven fat years, London schools are in a worse state than ever, angry that those who have not must bear the brunt of it. My mother used to argue that it was essential for the middle classes to send their kids to state schools because they would then campaign actively for their betterment. Well, I've still got two kids left in the state system, and I'm not about to shut up about it.

Sir Philip the Atlantic vulture

You know you're in trouble when the vultures of shmatte come to feed on your corpse. While money was pouring out of Iceland last week, Sir Philip Green was flying in. The nabob of high street ready-mades was in talks with the Icelandic PM with a view to taking over £1 billion of the investment group Baugur's debt a move that would give him control of such illustrious names as Karen Millen, House of Fraser and Moss Bros. The ever buoyant Green sounded like a one-man band of hope when he said rhetorically: "Do I think there are some pressures in the economy? Of course there are. But if we keep frightening everybody and terrorising everybody it will feed on itself." Far better that you should feed on those foolish horn-heads, eh, Sir Phil?

Mandy returns by gravy train

So Mandy, the PM's new best and most bumptious friend, has picked up a cool million in pension entitlements after his four years of backbreaking work as EU Trade Commissioner. Quelle surprise! After all, Neil Kinnock managed to scarf the same following seven years of cleaning out the Augean stables of Euro-corruption, Herculean labour that resulted in bringing to book precisely no one. As the Eurozone premiers desperately try to co-operate in saving their and our skins from the global financial pandemic, it may be the right time to reflect on how a half-century of co-operation between European leaders has given us British taxpayers so very little, while a rogues' gallery of superannuated politicos have ended up with so very much.