The Great Oxbridge Conundrum

9am Meeting of the Brexit Blue Skies Policy Committee. We are looking at all the things we'll be able to introduce under cover of Brexit that we'd never normally be able to get away with. Some great ideas put forward. Charging rough sleepers pavement rent particularly inspiring I thought. Given how many there are and how the numbers are going to rise, this could bring in millions. My own contribution, the Uberversity, went down well.  Solves the problem of redundant university lecturers and there are certainly going to be a lot of them, many having to sleep on the streets as well I suspect! They can combine cabbying with lecturing. Students would hire an uber driven by a specialist in whatever subject they are studying and he or she could give them a seminar en route. Really captures the go-ahead spirit of the Gig economy.

Chris Grayling was supposed to be introducing the joint Education and Transport department’s exciting new initiative but apparently he’d got on the wrong train again, and it was delayed anyway, so one of his Tory under-creatures, Rupert Smythe-Ponsonby stood in for him.  What the proposal amounts to is the unrolling of a new type of school chain across the country to be known as the Brexit Academies. They will have no schools and no staff but will offer efficient pizza delivery, which, as Rupert says, is where most of the kids would have ended up anyway. This is obviously modelled on Grayling’s visionary ferry initiative that so captured everyone’s imagination. “What a man! He’s turned incompetence into an art form”, I remark. “Should put him on display in the Tate Modern, preferably in a tank of formaldehyde”, responds Rory Stewart, the minister in charge of the Prison Service. Seems a bit harsh, after all, Grayling’s ‘Who Gives A Fuck’ attitude exemplifies everything that is great about modern Conservatism. I suspect Stewart is one of those old-fashioned, out-of-date ‘Gives A Shit’ Tories.  Be interesting to see how long he lasts.

11am Attend the opening of the first Facebook Academy. Nick Clegg does the honours. Apparently after his historic destruction of the Lib Dems, Facebook took him on as their chief Arsehole in Europe. He introduces the head of the new school Al Gorythm, the first CGI head (mind you I’ve met plenty of heads who might as well have been CGI). Boss Hinds is very enthusiastic about this venture and its promise of total 24/7 surveillance.  Al Gorythm assures us that the school will know everything, absolutely everything, that the kids get up to both in school and out; and that it will be able to shape their minds, their attitudes and opinions, without them ever being aware of what is going on. Innovative assessment procedures as well: kids are assessed according to how many friends they have and likes they get. And, of course, the school will generate a massive income by making the kids available for advertising.

The school’s social conscience is shown by the weekly blood donations that the kids make. This goes towards the company’s senior executives total blood transfusion programme, part of their ‘Immortality for the Super Rich’ project.  We have to keep quiet about this though because there is a worry that the hoi polloi might object if they knew the super-rich planned to live forever, while they all die. Can’t see it myself. Think people would be really enthusiastic about the super-rich living forever, benignly looking after everyone else’s interest as the rest of us live out our short lives.  I mean what amazing self-sacrifice on their part.

Interesting discussion afterwards with Clegg over a cup of camomile. Tells me he thought he was finished after the great Lib Dem wipe-out, totally discredited, regarded by just about everyone as a lying two-faced Tory stooge. Indeed, he was quite pleased to get out of politics once everything went pear-shaped. He’d hate to be Vince Cable, all the time having to go around pretending he’d never privatised the Royal Mail.  Facebook came to his rescue when he answered their advert for a glib hypocrite. Tells me how impressed he was by Mark Suckerborn, one of the richest men in the world.  “He told me Facebook was inspired by Orwell’s 1984”, Nick says, “I assumed he meant that he developed Facebook so as to make totalitarianism impossible. But no, not at all. It was the book’s vision of totalitarian control that inspired him. He sees Facebook as 1984 updated without the ‘proles’ having any idea about what is going on.  Have to admire him.  A man of genuine vision, a modern Big Brother. Suckerborn is one of the twenty-six richest men in the world and their wealth equals that of the bottom half of the world’s population. Truly we are blessed to live in a time when veritable Money Gods walk among us.  And one of these Gods is opening a school in Britain.  It is a real honour to be Suckerborn’s Arsehole”.  Clegg is getting quite carried away.

“What about your liberal principles?” I ask him.  “Oh, you are a card”, he laughs.

1.30pm The annual meeting to discuss the Oxbridge conundrum: how can we push up the numbers of public schoolboys going to Oxford and Cambridge? All our efforts have failed. Despite everything we have done to damage, indeed cripple, state education, schools are still turning out too many public school compatible students who are taking places off the real public schoolboys that Oxbridge was intended for. This great country of ours always has been and always will be ruled by public schoolboys. Preparatory school, public school, Oxford or Cambridge, Daddy’s bank and then the Cabinet. It was this that made Britain great. But now there are state schools where students are being coached in how to lose their regional accents so that Brummies can actually pass themselves off as English. Decent public schoolboys are being deprived of their rightful place, just because they are thick or stupid. What is to be done?

Rupert argues that we should just come out in the open about it and formally declare them public school universities, but as Boss Hinds points out, this is just naïve. “We get away with everything we do by saying we are doing the opposite. Improving the railways for example, cutting the number of homeless and ending poverty.  If we said we are fucking the railways up to maximise profit, increasing the number of homeless to drive up rents, and making more families poor and insecure by transferring wealth to the rich and super rich and, of course,for the sheer fun of it, we’d never get away with any of our policies”.

But what do we do?  One suggestion is a massive increase in fees for Oxford and Cambridge, something like £40,000 a year, about the same as Eton, but the problem has been all the rag-and-bone universities following suit.  Until we can sort that out, it’s a holding operation. We agree a statement committing the Government to increasing the number of state kids at Oxbridge and leave it at that.

3pm Boris Johnson’s leadership bid manifesto, ‘Make Britain Phwoar Again’, has leaked out.  Just looking at a copy to see what he has to say about education.  All school lessons to be taught in Latin; school leaving age to be lowered to twelve; every school to have a second-hand water cannon; and Toby Young to be given a peerage and be put in overall charge. He’s included his own school uniform designs which are apparently already available from Ann Summers.  Boris or Bozzie Bear, as he apparently likes to be called nowadays, will certainly make an entertaining Prime Minister.

5pm Raid the Clement Attlee Free School. We wait until all the kids have gone home to their hovels and then surprise the meeting of the school soviet and arrest everyone. That’ll put a stop to all the subversive lessons preaching equality and social justice, all the 'For the Many, Not the Few' crap.  The bloody school actually has a Food Bank would you believe, and the staff supply the kids with pens, paper, all sorts of school materials, even toilet paper, out of their own pockets. Commie bastards!  Vegan swine!  What’s the point of our cuts if the bloody teachers sabotage them.  As they are led out the scum are showing their defiance by singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn! Oh Jeremy Corbyn!” Naïve fools.  They obviously have no idea about the actual past history of their precious Labour governments, that their beloved Attlee was a strong supporter of the public school system and that one of the most reactionary Education Secretaries ever, the great much-missed David Blunkett, was and still is a Labour Party member and, of course, a good friend of Rupert Murdoch. We’ve always had the Labour Party well under control.  The upper echelons are still packed with our undercover agents or the Scab Tendency as we affectionately call them.  They actually took the Party over quite openly when our man Blair was in charge.  Oh Jeremy Corbyn indeed.  Even if he gets into office we’ll have him trussed up like a turkey.  Got to laugh.