Over the years I have filled this column with many things. I’ve suggested Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon should have a fight in the Albert Hall. I’ve revealed that Mars once crashed into my chimney pots and I’ve explained that if you painted a picture using a sheep’s dingleberries instead of oils you could sell it to Walsall borough council for £150,000.

In other words, when it comes to subject matter I have plumbed the bottom of the barrel and then kept right on going. But I have never written about one of the most discussed topics in Britain today. Education.

There’s a very good reason for this. I don’t understand any of the debates.

I’ve talked to David Cameron about grammar schools; about how he doesn’t want any more but he doesn’t mind if councils build lots and I’m afraid my eyes glazed over – partly because it all sounded like politico-gobbledegook and partly because, if I’m honest, I don’t actually know what a grammar school is.

I think they are places for pupils who can tie up their own shoelaces, as opposed to comprehensive schools, which are big ugly buildings on the outskirts of town for pupils who wish to be stabbed.

Then you have assisted schools. Again, I’m afraid I’m not your man for guidance. All I can say for sure is that you should avoid them like the plague because, having read Alastair Campbell’s book – Why I Am Brilliant – it seems they are entirely filled with the children of new Labour ministers.

What does interest me are public schools. I went to one. My mother went to one. And I’ve always sort of known that my children would go to one as well.

Of course, you may well sneer at that. You may say it is entirely unfair that some children are given a better start in life than others. And I would absolutely have to agree with you. In the same way that it’s entirely unfair that some people are born fat or ugly or dyslexic or disabled or ginger or small or Welsh. Life, I’m afraid, is tragic.

And besides, I use exactly the same argument with private schools that I use with private medicine. People who can afford it should be required to indulge because it stops rich bastards clogging up the system for everyone else.

Why should my kids take a place at our local comp – which is excellent, I hear – when it could go to someone whose parents can’t afford the alternative? Answer me that, Mr Lenin.

And no. Please don’t say that you’ve read somewhere that state schools now provide a better education than those in the private sector. I’ve read the stories too and never, in all my years, have I seen so many mangled statistics. In essence, they find one state school that has (just) outperformed one private school and whoopee-do. It’s a red letter day in The Guardian.

Well I’m sorry but that’s like watching Doncaster Rovers beat Derby County in an FA Cup match and then arguing that all League One clubs are better than all clubs in the Barclays Premier League.

Here’s something to chew on. In order to be the school lad at Repton, all I had to do was rub a gallon of creosote into the housemaster’s cormorant. Had I wished to be the school lad at my local comp, I would have had to burn it down.

That’s why I laugh at all those stories about misbehaving public school kids wreaking havoc in Cornwall every summer. Oh do me a favour. What sort of havoc are we talking about here?

Smoking joints on the beach? Vomiting Pimm’s into your hydrangeas? Did one of them debag the vicar? And is that so bad? Or would you rather your village was taken over each year by a gang of yobs from Croxteth with their sub-machineguns?

Again, you might say you can’t bear spoilt rich kids with their trusts and their floppy Boden hair. Fine. But if you are going to use extremes then I hope you don’t mind if I respond in kind. I can’t bear gormless louts who hang around in shopping centres, shoplifting and catching venereal diseases.

But let’s stop the insults. I’ve always felt that sending a child away to boarding school helps them learn, very quickly, that if they upset others, there’s no running home afterwards. They have to deal with it. This means they are more likely, in later life, to be “good in a room”.

Then there is the range of opportunities. The state system, we keep being told, struggles to find an inflated football, let alone somewhere it can be kicked, while most public schools have their own underwater hang glider display team.

And, of course, gone are the days when you packed your boy off at 13 saying: “See you when you’re 18. And try not to get buggered too much.” Nowadays, almost everyone employed by the main public schools isn’t a predatory homosexual.

As you can see, I am entirely blinkered and useless when it comes to schools. I’ve always been the biggest fan of private education, the boarding school system and I have to be physically restrained when it’s criticised.

Right up to the point last week when I dropped my eldest off at her new boarding school. After the death of my father, it was, without doubt, the most painful experience of my life. Leaving my daughter in a strange place, in the hands of a group of people I barely know. And then just driving away.

It’s a barbaric and hateful thing to do. And what makes it worse is that she’s going to absolutely love it.

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