Two days after the FT published its interview with Michael Gove in which the Education Secretary described the number of Old Etonians in David Cameron’s inner circle as “ridiculous” and “preposterous”, the Tory class war shows no sign of ending. David Cameron is reported to have given Gove “a right royal bollocking” over his comments and it looks as if he’ll also have to have a stern word with Sayeeda Warsi.
On tonight’s edition of ITV’s The Agenda, the Foreign Office minister will join Gove on the barricades when she produces a mock frontpage (featuring OEs Cameron, Jo Johnson, Oliver Letwin and Ed Llewellyn) with the headline “Number 10 takes Eton Mess off the menu”. Even by the standards of Warsi, a minister renowned for going off message, it’s a remarkably provocative intervention. She will tell the programme: “Michael was making an incredibly serious point that it can’t be right that the 7 per cent of kids who go to independent school end up at the top tables, not just of politics, but banking, and law, and every other profession, and that what Michael wants to create is a first class, world class state system which means that in future years you will have more pupils from state schools, people like me, around the cabinet table, and in that I fully support Michael Gove.”
The more one reads Warsi’s headline, the worse it gets for Cameron. How is he supposed to take “Eton Mess” off the menu when he’s part of it? Resign? If Warsi was a New Labour minister, I expect resigning is precisely what she’d be ordered to do tomorrow morning.
As Ed Miliband prepares to respond to George Osborne’s Budget by declaring that this is a recovery “for the few, not the many“, it’s hard to think of a worse possible backdrop for the Tories. By denouncing Cameron’s “Eton Mess”, Warsi has done Labour’s spinners work for them. There couldn’t be a more perfect attack line for Miliband to store for Wednesday afternoon.
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