Can it really be that the Conservative Party has turned its back on Rab Butler, whose 1944 Education Act created the postwar grammar school, in favour of Tony Crosland, the Labour Education Minister, whose “Circular 10/65” heralded the age of nonselective education?

Yet comprehensive schools did not sweep all before them because Labour’s anti-selection ideologues won power in the 1964 and 1966 general elections. In 1963, Edward Boyle, the Tory Education Secretary, wrote Educational Opportunity, a pamphlet that questioned whether sharply differentiating at age 11 between academically able children and the other 80 per cent was the way forward.

Boyle, an Old Etonian baronet with progressive views, was gently moving the Tories towards supporting comprehensives. Meanwhile, Harold Wilson, the grammar-school-educated Labour leader, fought the 1964 election campaign with the assurance that grammar schools would disappear over his “dead body”.

Of course, some politicians will say anything to get elected and the Wilson Government duly got down to denying funds to schools that refused to go comprehensive. But comprehensivisation was already under way in the Tory years and would not have been stopped had Boyle continued as Education Secretary after 1964.

Indeed, A Better Tomorrow, the 1970 Conservative manifesto, left it to local authorities to decide what sorts of school they wanted. While it hoped that the best of the grammar schools might go unmolested, the manifesto nonetheless took pride that “many of the most imaginative new schemes abolishing the 11-plus have been introduced by Conservative councils”.

The Tories won the election. Both Edward Heath and his new Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, were proud products of grammar schools. But having committed the party to letting local education authorities decide what was best, they limited their own scope to interfere. Overwhelmingly, the local authorities opted to go comprehensive. This was why more grammar schools (3,286 in all) were scrapped during Mrs Thatcher’s tenure as Education Secretary than in any other period.

At the time, opinion polls showed massive support for comprehensives. Many wrongly imagined, however, that comprehensives and grammars could happily coexist. Further confusion was sown by Labour claims that comprehensives were “grammar schools for all”.

Thus the debate took place in a haze of misunderstanding. Unlike, of course, today when the replacement of “bog standard” comps by city academies, foundation or specialist schools and selection by aptitude but not ability is so readily understood . . .

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