David Johnston

Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work. Throughout my near two decades working on social mobility I would periodically hear the call for grammar schools to return. In evidence, I'd be told about the boys who went to one and went on to university while their classmates who didn't went down the pit, into a manual job or similar. This view is sincerely held.

I often joke that when I became an MP in 2019, after being a charity chief executive, I went from saint to sinner in the mind of the public. When you work for a charity, people assume you’re one of the good guys: honest, principled, in it for the right reasons. Too often politicians are seen as the opposite: dishonest, unprincipled, in it for themselves – and probably fiddling their expenses. Both stereotypes are wrong, yet they persist. I am regularly asked why I made the switch – not least by friends and family members, who know politics matters but wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. It is a question that I know will be asked more regularly after the senseless killing of Sir David Amess.

It was curious to see the explosion of outrage over the UK no longer participating in the Erasmus scheme. We were told it broadened young people’s horizons by sending British undergraduates to study at a European university. We were told our young people are being deprived of this opportunity. But having spent my pre-politics career working with young people, Erasmus and deprivation are not things I’ve ever associated with one another. The outrage is largely coming from a collection of the firmly middle class and affluent anti-Brexit folk – TV broadcasters and QCs among them.