Back to school for Team Truss as Tory MPs seek more comprehensive leadership

The prime minister’s education claim was barely true, as Kate Devlin explains

Hard to swallow: Liz Truss during her speech in Birmingham on Wednesday (PA)

At the Conservative conference in Birmingham, unity was in short supply but Tory MPs representing different wings of the party were agreed on one point – despair at the unforced errors of the Truss government.

Yes, the new prime minister was dealt a difficult hand when the Queen died days after she entered Downing Street. But many MPs moan that the rot began almost at the moment Ms Truss became Tory leader.

Some who had resigned themselves to losing their ministerial jobs when she took over are furious at the manner in which they were sacked. It convinced some who supported Rishi Sunak for leader that, essentially, their careers as anything other than backbench MPs are now over.

“It was all so… unnecessary,” said one.

A similar complaint was heard about the government’s mini-Budget. Many Tory MPs are sceptical about the claim it was a communications problem that sent the pound to its lowest ever level. But they do think it was an unforced error.

And so to the controversy over Ms Truss’s eccentric boast of being the first prime minister to go to a comprehensive school.

The best that can be said about this claim is that it is just about true – on a very slim technicality: previous Tory PMs who went to state schools were too old to have encountered England’s comprehensive system (Sir John Major’s south London grammar school later became a comprehensive, and Theresa May’s grammar school converted during her time there), while Labour’s Gordon Brown was educated in Scotland where the term isn’t used but he attended the direct equivalent. (He was reportedly fast-tracked because of his ability, but the Scottish state education system is generally more equitable than in England.)

Nor is Ms Truss anything close to the first Tory leader to have attended a comprehensive state school; William Hague went to one near Rotherham and Iain Duncan Smith attended a Catholic secondary modern in the West Midlands.

Having attended Roundhay School in Leeds, which ditched grammar school-style entrance-exam requirements in 1972, Ms Truss can claim to be the first Conservative prime minister to have completed an entirely comprehensive state school education. But that’s not what she told the conference hall in Birmingham.

However you slice it, Liz Truss is hardly a trailblazer for the downtrodden or a pioneer for the state-schooled in Downing Street. And that’s even before you consider that her chancellor and two out of her three predecessors attended Eton.

A simple Google search would have set her speechwriters straight. Of course, at issue here is class, and an attempt to throw off the “Tory toff” label. But so too is attention to detail, which is giving backbench Tory MPs something to worry about.