Further, he was himself an 11-plus failure, and deeply opposes selection. As John Major taunted Mr Blair at Commons Question Time on Tuesday, the deputy leader was unable to conceal his feelings.However, by Wednesday, when Ms Harman faced the Parliamentary Labour Party, Mr Blair had already talked Mr Prescott round at a private meeting. The PLP meeting was, according to one shadow cabinet minister, “the most highly charged since the 1983 election”. There was standing room only as Ms Harman apologised in a two-minute speech which was greeted with silence. One MP observed: “It was evident that she had few reserves of support to call upon.”Then Mr Blair rode to her defence, putting his leadership on the line. He told the assembled MPs: “I am not going to allow the Tories the pleasure of crucifying any member of my shadow cabinet I’m not going to yield up any scalp. That’s John Major’s way.”He won the day, but there was little doubting the shock and alarm in Labour ranks.

When, on Tuesday, David Blunkett, the shadow education secretary, made a school visit to Croydon the local MP, Malcolm Wicks, told him: “This is the local sixth-form college – and my kids attended it.” “Thank God for that,” replied Mr Blunkett.MS HARMAN’s career, for the time being at least, was saved. But was Labour’s education policy? The division within the party over schools is not a simple one between left and right. Indeed, it was the old Labour right – notably the late Anthony Crosland – to whom comprehensive education was an article of faith. They saw the redistribution of educational opportunity, rather than the redistribution of income and property, as the route to a better and more equal society. Their heirs, such as Roy Hattersley, sniff betrayal in the hints of new Labour ambiguity about the virtues of comprehensives.

Beyond them lie the ranks of teachers, who account for a large slice of Labour’s membership. They suspect new Labour of betraying them by joining Tory “teacher-bashing”, particularly against those who struggle in inner-city schools.Further, Labour MPs have always been vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy in such areas as education and health. Just as the Tories, the party that rails against sexual promiscuity and family break-up, are damaged by adulterous MPs, so Labour, as the party that rails against privilege, is damaged by any suggestion that its members are grabbing special advantages for themselves or their families.It is almost unimaginable now that any Labour leader would send his or her child outside the state sector. Mr Blair has chosen the London Oratory, a comprehensive that has opted out of local authority control, for his son; Ms Harman a selective grammar school. Both are at pains to point out that these schools are within the state sector; at least they are not buying privilege. Yet 30 years ago, Labour leaders, such as Harold Wilson and Denis Healey, could send their children to independent schools and occasion little comment Wilson’s adviser, John Vaizey, sent his son to Eton.

In those days, the state sector, based on grammar and secondary modern schools, was itself riddled with inequality. Only when the comprehensive system became dominant in the 1970s did it become axiomatic that Labour MPs and prominent supporters should send their children to state schools.Professor David Donnison, a Labour adviser in the 1960s, whose first son went to grammar school, sent the last four to comprehensives. “For a lot of people it was a matter of principle that you should at least try to send your child to a comprehensive.” Maurice Kogan, another academic and Labour adviser from that generation, sent his children to his neighbourhood comprehensive, Islington Green in London, while it was still transforming itself from a struggling secondary modern. He aimed to help improve it by ensuring it had good governors and an inspiring new head.

Such a step, he believes, may have been easier then than it is now “We did agonise over it But there was a progressive vogue for comprehensives There were more middle-class people doing it. People were still optimistic that comprehensives might do what we hoped. Now they are more pessimistic, whether or not that is justified.”Under the Tories, the problem has become all the more difficult because, once more, the state school system has become fragmented. Ms Harman, perhaps because the leak of her grammar school decision took her by surprise, never quite articulated the strongest argument in her defence – that, because the smarter parents in metropolitan areas now have so many different ways of finding alternatives for their children, the genuine urban comprehensive, with a balanced intake of children from all social classes and all ability levels, is all but dead. There are technology colleges, opted-out schools, specialist schools concentrating on languages, sport or music.