Howls of outrage have greeted Ruth Kelly’s decision to send her son to a private school. Some would have us believe that it is the latest kick in the teeth for the egalitarian values that made old Labour great.

Apparently, those fine men of yesteryear, who dragged themselves up by their bootstraps, would be appalled by Ms Kelly’s collaboration with the class enemy. Take, for example, Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister. The product of a liaison between a Scottish farm labourer and a housemaid, he made do with the local schooling available in rural Lossiemouth. Understandably, he grew up determined to improve the lot of the many, not the few.

Except that this did not prevent him sending his sons to public school. What’s more, they loved it. Their father’s pacifism and supposed lack of patriotism received a verbal pasting during the First World War. But neither the staff nor pupils at Bedales took it out on his sons. Had they been educated in the East End, the MacDonald boys might not have got off so lightly.

MacDonald, of course, ended up falling foul of his colleagues in 1931 when he responded to the financial crisis by forming a coalition with the Tories. Socialists have ever since regarded him as highly suspect. Among those colleagues who walked away from him was Clement Attlee, the greatest hero in Labour’s pantheon.

And where did Attlee educate his children? He wanted his son Martin to go to his old school, Haileybury. But young Martin had learning difficulties brought on by dyslexia. So he sent him instead to another public school which offered help for those with special needs, Millfield.

As for the Attlee daughters, they went to St Hilda’s, a private school in Bushey. One day a classmate asked little Felicity Attlee: “Why are you here when your father believes in state education?” Unable to think of a good reason, Felicity went home and asked her father. “The man who lives in the world as though the world is the way he hopes it is going to be,” replied the Labour sage, “is a crank!”

One can see why Ms Kelly preferred to ask for privacy rather than respond with the Attlee quip. But without his Haileybury education, Attlee might never have joined Labour. It was through his old school’s support for a boys’ club in Stepney that he got involved in the social problems of the East End.

Even after he became Prime Minister, Attlee was never embarrassed by his own, or his children’s, private schooling. When he addressed the US Congress in November 1945 he took pride in pointing out to them that “the old school tie can still be seen on the government benches”.

How reassuring to see Ruth Kelly endorsing the views of that visionary Labour leader.

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