Smash hit

We ask again how he and Mr Cameron complement each other, and a distinct theme emerges: his repeated use of the word “metropolitan”. To many, the two appear as posh as each other, but Mr Osborne is in fact the son of a left-wing mother and a self-made man who sold his Mini to found a wallpaper business. He is known to get irritated when people call him an Old Etonian — confusing him with Mr Cameron — and their schooling is almost the first difference that he suggested.

“Well, of course we’re different. We’re different ages and we had a different education. I went to a London independent school, a day school, and he went to a boarding school. He grew up in the countryside, I grew up in the centre of town. My family background is actually not at all shire county Conservative. It was very metropolitan. There was no family stately home.”

Although he uses his own education as a defining influence, he also believes that there is too much weight attached to the meaning of where a politician went to school, when “the public don’t care”. “Michael Howard, from his Llanelli grammar school; William Hague, from his South Yorkshire comprehensive; John Major from his Brixton school; those three actually struggled in different ways to connect with the public. David Cameron, with, as you put it, his Old Etonian background, is connecting.” And again, away from political image, Mr Osborne knows how much schools — good schools — really do matter. Mr Osborne’s son goes to a state primary. Will he go on to a state secondary?

“If we can find a good one, yeah.” And if not? “We will try and find a good one.”

This is one of the big shifts in the Conservative Party, he said, that “we are not talking about grammar schools, we are talking about improving secondary moderns”.

Most parents who send their children to a private school would rather send their children to a state school, he believes, if only they could find a good one. And the parents who manage to jump through the “extraordinary number” of hoops to get their child into a good state school tend to be “the articulate, educated, better-off middle classes”.

“They are better at using the state system. That is a generalisation, but it is an accurate one. Sadly, not enough parents care about the quality of education in their local school and one of the things we’ve got to do is get the parents more interested in that.”

By far his greatest privilege, he said, was his happy childhood. Deprivation, “starts before you even turn up on the first day of school”, he said.

“And getting in and helping those parents who often themselves have been deprived of proper education and have limited aspirations is a real problem.”

How much does the Shadow Chancellor care? Gordon Brown has made a commitment to raise spending on state schools to the same level as the current spending on private schools, £8,000 a head. It is an open-ended promise, with no timetable attached, but still, would Mr Osborne care to match it? “It is a meaningless pledge,” he wriggled. “It is a perfectly noble aspiration to have state schools that are as good as private schools.” So why not promise it as well? He shrugged.

“Well I’ll promise it then, it just doesn’t mean anything. If you want me to say do I match Gordon Brown’s commitment that at some point in the future education spending per pupil in state schools will be £8,000 per head. Yes, because it’s true. It is always going to be the case.”

The party conference next week will be something of a showcase for this caring new Conservatism and also a showdown for those on the right of the party. On the one side he will announce plans to extend the right to ask for flexible working to parents of children over the age of 5, and to make childcare the centrepiece of his speech.

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