TOM UTLEY: Our family lived in a pokey flat with no carpets so I could go to school

As our four boys were growing up, there were many times when I asked myself why I went on crippling the Utley finances for the sake of giving our two oldest a private education.

Colleagues who earned roughly the same as I did, but who chose to send their young to state schools, lived much more comfortable lives. Most of them lived in posher areas, drove swankier cars and swanned off on far more glamorous holidays than those we spent sponging off kind friends in Ireland or Normandy.

More annoying still, the Left-wingers among them tended to assume an insufferable air of moral superiority, as if there was something noble about their decision to save themselves a king’s ransom in school fees.

They didn’t want to give their children unfair advantages, they would say, before asking us if we’d like to see the photographs of their family’s latest fabulous skiing holiday in Gstaad.

In my gloomier moments, I even found myself wishing that Labour politicians would hurry up and carry out their threat to abolish private schools — something they’ve been promising to do throughout my lifetime, since long before Sir Keir Starmer came up with his pledge to charge VAT on school fees, and so to close hundreds by stealth.

If only those Lefties had matched deeds to words, a huge financial burden would have been lifted from my shoulders and I could have sent all four boys to state schools with a clear conscience.

Sacrifices

So why did I carry on paying through the nose to educate the two oldest, when I could have sent them to the local comp for nothing? Why, come to that, would I also have sent the two youngest to private schools, if only the money hadn’t run out after we’d increased our mortgage for the fifth time?

It wasn’t even clear that I was giving the two oldest a leg-up in life — at least, not in the sense that my Left-wing friends meant.

Even in those far-off days, (our oldest is now 37), universities had begun discriminating against the products of private schools, anxious to avoid the Blairite Establishment’s charge that they were entrenching monied privilege by allocating places according to exam results, interview performance, sporting or musical prowess — at all of which the private sector excelled.

Many employers, too, such as the BBC, were already on the lookout for recruits from working-class backgrounds, or with regional accents, in preference to better-qualified candidates who sounded too posh for this egalitarian era.

But let’s be honest. Even today, a private education remains a considerable advantage in life — and although it’s not nearly such a sure path as once it was to a place at a top university or a plum job, it’s still a great help.

Certainly, this thought played a part in my own decision to choose private schools for as many of my young as I could afford. But a much greater consideration was my feeling of a moral duty to make the same sacrifice for my sons as my father made for me, when he sent me to the eye‑wateringly expensive public school, Westminster (where the fees for day boys are now £31,464 a year!)

God knows, he struggled to afford it — despite all the school’s efforts to help him with the fees. One year, for example, the final demand for my fees came with the news that I was the unlikely recipient of a bequest to the school ‘for the sons of the clergy’ — a subsidy for which I hardly qualified, since my father was a journalist (though I should add that he was a distinguished pillar of the Church of England).

Another year, I won an exhibition described vaguely as being ‘for deserving boys’ — another description that didn’t begin to fit me — which actually meant ‘for boys whose parents seem to be having a helluva hard time finding the money for the fees’.

Because of my parents’ huge sacrifices, we lived in a pokey flat with no carpets or central heating, rotting window frames and a dodgy gas-fired geyser that often produced only a trickle of lukewarm water. My two sisters, poor creatures, had to share a tiny bedroom until they were well into their teens.

Thrilled

But somehow or other, with help from the school’s past benefactors, I was able to stay at Westminster for the full five years before going on to Cambridge. And, goodness, how privileged I felt (though I hate to confess that I would have died of shame if any of my millionaire schoolfriends, who included a Sieff of Marks & Sparks, a Zilkha of Mothercare and a son of the Earl of Harewood, had visited our flat and seen the poverty in which we lived).

It never ceased to give me a buzz that our school chapel was Westminster Abbey, where I sat in Poet’s Corner every morning for prayers. It thrilled me that I was being taught by the school where Sir Christopher Wren learned his maths, John Dryden his Latin and Greek, and the philosopher John Locke had his grounding in Aristotle and Plato.

So, yes, I admit it. When our sons came along, I wanted the same sort of privileges for them. Though I was realistic enough to see that Westminster was far beyond my reach, I felt I could just about manage Dulwich College, where today’s fees are £22,971 a year for day boys.

So it was that our first two enjoyed Dulwich’s superb playing fields and other sports facilities (far superior to Westminster’s), its theatre and libraries and the cachet of attending the same school as such geniuses as P. G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Bob Monkhouse. Nigel Farage went there, too, as it happens — though, strangely, the school tends not to boast about him.

As for our other two sons, with no more dosh to be borrowed, one went to Wilson’s Grammar School in Sutton, the other to our local comp.

Now, it’s only fair to report that all four boys came through these different systems with almost identical top-grade exam results, and all of them went on to gain 2:1 degrees at Russell Group universities (Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester and Sheffield, if you’re interested).

Taxed

So perhaps I could have spent my cash on glamorous holidays and swanky cars, instead of pouring it into Dulwich’s coffers. But I like to think our best private schools offer that certain something extra, which makes the expense worthwhile for those who are lucky or hard-working enough to afford the fees.

What is quite clear, however, is that Sir Keir’s plan to slap 20 per cent VAT on school fees would price these world‑beating institutions far beyond the reach of families like mine, which have been just about able to manage until now, at the expense of heavy sacrifices.

In his brave new world, the country’s best-performing schools would become more than ever the exclusive preserve of Sieffs, Zilkhas, the offspring of hedge-fund managers and heirs to the house of Harewood. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of poorer private school pupils — between 90,000 and 134,800, according to various estimates — would be driven into the state sector.

Will he actually put his policy into action, unlike all those earlier Labour leaders? From the point of view of the economy, of course, he’d be mad if he did.

After all, those who pay school fees — out of income that has already been taxed, please note — not only save the state the expense of educating their young. They also pay through their taxes to educate other people’s children. So it’s win-win for the Treasury.

No, Sir Keir’s figures simply don’t add up. Indeed, you can bet your bottom dollar that his naked appeal to class envy would cost the Government tens of millions more than it would raise from VAT.

But let me offer a tip to the Labour leader. By far the greatest threat to private schools came in the 1950s, when our flourishing grammar schools were producing results that put many fee‑paying institutions to shame, filling our best universities with the bright offspring of working-class families. But of course the great comprehensive experiment put paid to all that.

If Labour really wants to deaden the attraction of private schools, how about bringing back grammars?