ROBERT HARDMAN: Education Secretary whose ‘poor little me’ back story is as risible as her grammar

The sun is setting on the midweek match at Didsbury Cricket Club. The street’s wine bars and gastropubs are packed with drinkers in the early evening.

It’s the kind of scene that led to the area being branded as Manchester’s ‘Notting Hill’, albeit a leafier version of the London original that gave rise to the Conservative Party’s famous ‘Notting Hill Set’.

Given that Andy Burnham is leading Britain’s political elite towards the M6 ​​to set up business in ‘Number 10 North’, we may soon hear talk of a new ‘Didsbury Embankment’.

Or perhaps not, to listen to Lucy Powell, Mr Burnham’s staunch ally and neighbour, whom he has appointed as his new Minister for Education.

Born and raised in the south Manchester suburb of Didsbury, where she still lives, Ms Powell would prefer us to think of this part of the city as a dump dragged by the bootstraps.

But many aspects of Lucy Powell’s life story don’t quite add up.

To begin with, we claim that, of everyone at the allegedly impoverished Catholic sixth-form college, he alone got into Oxford in his year.

‘That year I was the only sixth form student out of a very large college of 2,000 to get into Oxford. “The day I got the offer I cried because I didn’t want to go,” the Manchester Central MP told the BBC’s Nick Robinson last year. According to at least two of his contemporaries at Xaverian College, the Financial Times discovered this was clearly not the case.

His Tory rivals wasted no time in calling out the shouters in his first social media post in his new job

In fact, Oxbridge had many successes. Graduates recalled that teachers put great effort into preparing their star students for entrance exams and interviews.

A spokesman for Ms Powell said she was now “very happy to be corrected” and that she “in no way belittles the achievements of others”.

I arrive at Xaverian (currently closed for summer) to find a very nice campus with a beautiful, well-kept green landscape at its centre. Some buildings are Victorian, others are brand new.

The whole place exudes a sense of purpose, as does the website, which does its best to emphasize that the sky is the limit. I can’t imagine current staff would be too thrilled about the Education Secretary remembering this place as a struggling backwater with one bright star – Ms Powell.

Nor was he grateful in the slightest for his passport to Somerville College, Oxford, to study chemistry. He gave it a year and then resigned to go to King’s College in London, citing the elitist atmosphere.

‘Oxford was no place for a public school girl from the North studying maths and chemistry. ‘I was like a duck out of water,’ he told the Times Education Supplement.

How did Margaret Thatcher, another northern states student studying chemistry at Somerville, survive when she appeared in 1943?

Ms Powell’s claims were met with groans of disbelief from other northern state students who attended Oxford University around the same time.

‘Everyone came like a duck out of water. Then you started swimming. There were far more northern girls involved in science than Etonians,’ says Miranda, a Mancunian at a nearby university and a successful lawyer in London.

Ms Powell, 51, also complained about her first encounters with men who ‘explained themselves’, although this was not an issue at Somerville College.

She did not accept men until the year after they broke up.

One of the first people there was Sam Gyimah. He may have felt like a duck out of water compared to Ms. Powell, not only as a man but also because he came from an ethnic minority.

He himself came from a public school but had previously grown up in Ghana. Mr Gyimah somehow stayed on that path, later being elected president of the Oxford Union and, like Ms Powell, elected to Parliament (she now has a career in finance).

No one can accuse Oxford of being a right-wing bastion of Tory supporters. After all, he refused to give an honorary degree to the first female prime minister in British history because of her Conservative credentials.

Ms Powell welcomes members to Labor Party press conference in central London earlier this month

There are similar gaps in Ms Powell’s life stories of growing up in Didsbury, now a symbol of bourgeois respectability. Ms Powell remembers it simply as ‘Manchester under Thatcher’, a place where schools were ‘starved of resources’. ‘It wasn’t this luxurious back then,’ he said.

While all the residents I spoke to agreed that Didsbury has been on an upward trend for years, older ones say it’s never been that bad.

‘If you wanted to fight you went downtown. “If you wanted to drink, you came to Didsbury,” says retired researcher Frank O’Brien, recalling the 1980s and 1990s. ‘They were raising the prices a little bit here to keep the shoes away.’

Ms. Powell’s first secondary school was Parrs Wood High School; which wasn’t too bad since the school also produced Cabinet minister Lisa Nandy. Indeed, it was recently dubbed ‘the new Eton’ by the Manchester Evening News.

Ms. Powell comes from an aristocracy of impeccable middle-class education. The Times Education Supplement reported that his mother was a headteacher who ran a multi-academy trust, while a grandfather, two aunts and an uncle were also chairman (one aunt was awarded a CBE).

Although he is now firmly opposed to grammar schools, he acknowledged that his father, a social worker, benefited from the ‘social mobility’ of primary education.

Ms. Powell joked about her own middle-class credentials. ‘I married a doctor, you know; There’s nothing more middle class than that!’ (He has two school-age children and an adult stepson), he told the BBC.

He’s also an avid fan of Britain’s biggest annual middle-class bash, telling Vogue he’s attended Glastonbury Festival 23 times.

How far he is from the mean streets of Britain’s inner cities was underlined last year by the famously disdainful response to a fellow panelist on the Radio 4 current affairs program Any Questions (from the Reform) when he brought up the sexual abuse of young girls by grooming gangs.

‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, don’t we?’ Ms. Powell retorted. ‘Yeah, okay, let’s blow the whistle on that dog.’

He apologized the next day, just after Tory and Reform calls for him to be stripped of his Cabinet post as Leader of the House of Representatives. She insists her values ​​are shaped by her working-class roots: ‘My mother is the daughter of Irish immigrants. My father grew up in a two-up, two-down house with an outside toilet. Instead of being ‘dirty middle class’ as I call it, I have the morality and pride that comes with being respectful and polite; The more stylish you are, the less uncomfortable you will be.’

So how will the indie industry badass compare to her predecessor, Bridget Phillipson? There seems to be little sign of ideological change.

The woman, who proudly wore a ‘I’ve Never Kissed a Conservative’ t-shirt at Manchester’s 2022 Pride Parade, has previously said she thinks private schools should not only be subject to VAT, but should also lose all charity status altogether.

And the signs are not bright for literacy standards. His Tory rivals wasted no time in highlighting the shouters in his first social media post in the new job: ‘Absolutely electrified [sic] He will be appointed as Education Secretary.’

In recounting her past, of course, she faithfully repeats Andy Burnham’s “Westminster”https://www.dailymail.com/”Whitehall”https://www.dailymail.com/”mantra that the South was unfair to the British North. This is Ms. Powell’s story, and if she would rather be seen as a victim than an inspirational Mancunian achiever, so be it.

But it wouldn’t be a waste to be grateful to all the teachers who put him on his path.