Ruth Kelly’s move to send her child to a private school is a triumph of truth over ideology. Never mind that her position as a minister makes her decision a textbook example of hypocrisy, defined in the OED as “the practice of claiming to have higher standards or beliefs than is the case”. There are worse sins in life than hypocrisy, and these include sacrificing your children on the altar of your political beliefs.

How I wish that my mother and father had put aside their commitment to the “cause” in order to do the right thing for their offspring. As the child of Marxist-cum-hippie parents living in the East End of London, it took my Tory grandmother to flag up exceptional 11-plus exam results and instigate an application to one of London’s top private schools in the 1980s. But when a free place was offered, my parents, fearing the terrible influence of “snobs” on my personal development, declined it on my behalf.

At the same time, all our so-called left-wing friends quietly awoke to the realisation that we are not selfless beings after all. One by one, the invisible pacts that had developed through years of garden parties in Islington and Hampstead fell apart. Soon I was the only one left at North Westminster Community School, a huge, rough inner-city comprehensive in West London. The school has now been renamed a “city academy” and Karen Buck, a former aviation minister, announced last month that she would be withdrawing her 12-year-old son Kosmo after just one term. She apparently labelled the school “appalling”.

Apart from the name, it seems that little has changed since I was there 20 years ago. Then, we were told, the school had been praised by government inspectors and was “constantly improving”. The reality was cruelly different. Discipline was non-existent: pupils ran riot and bullying was rife. I had no proper English lessons in two years — the priority was “English as a second language” and a succession of supply teachers had us copy out of books. To call it teaching would be an exaggeration. We witnessed one of our chaperones being half-strangled with a scarf and locked in a cupboard. At other times she was showered with handfuls of staples. There were no playing fields, and favourite lunchtime activities included truancy and shoplifting. The school was run by Michael Marland, a well-meaning, bow-tie-wearing liberal educationist who sent his own son to private school.

So, to all those middle-class liberals who just haven’t got the stomach to bring about the Utopia of wonderful state education for all, stop your pathetic hand-wringing. There’s something even more damaging than sending your child to a private school, and that’s being ashamed about doing it.