Steve Richards: Cameron must learn the lessons of this pointless furore over grammar schools

Sometimes a political storm erupts. From the perspective of the battered leadership the unexpected gales are a force of nature disrupting carefully prepared plans. Yet the causes of a tempest nearly always cast light on a party, as protagonists and victims seek shelter with a fearful anger.

So it is with the row engulfing the Conservative Party over the leadership's approach to grammar schools. On one level the uproar is deranged. As David Cameron pointed out at his press conference yesterday, he declared his opposition to more grammar schools during his leadership contest 18 months ago.

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At the Conservatives' annual conference last October I had coffee with their Education spokesman, David Willets, when he cited casually their opposition to grammar schools as one example of a change in substance. He did not do so with a nod and a wink that he was guiding me in the direction of a political explosion. He spoke in the past tense, in relation to an issue that had been settled.

So how to explain the past few days of Tory rage? First, it is worth stressing that what Willets attempted to do last week was right for his party in substance and clever in terms of positioning. The only new element in his speech was the context, support for city academies in the post-Blair era. I disagree with Willets' proposals to introduce an even looser regulatory framework (they will make matters worse for the poor), but for the Conservatives it is precisely where they should be: "Look at us, more Blairite than Blair, and what a shame Gordon Brown's Labour party is not with us." It is the neat sequel to the party's tactically astute support for Blair's Schools Bill.

Equally important, Willets' critical observations about grammar schools were based on the evidence. Those pampered schools are not beacons of social mobility, but a means of getting a private education for wealthy parents paid for by the state, leaving the other nearby state schools with a poorer intake.

As the modernising Conservative MP John Bercow told me yesterday, "the idea that such schools are socially inclusive is for the birds. The proportion from poor backgrounds is very small and I fear that Conservatives have a contrary view based on their own experience, which is decades out of date".

He declares himself to be "100% behind Cameron and Willets", and he should know, representing a constituency in Buckinghamshire, a county with several grammar schools, and as an MP who is alert to totemic issues.

Not for the first time Bercow is both correct and in a minority in his party. The right-wing newspapers scream with fury. Michael Howard can hardly contain his anger. Activists are bombarding Conservative websites. One normally mild-mannered frontbencher was on the verge of giving an interview this weekend to declare his opposition in ways that he knew would get him sacked. Others are threatening to resign. This is over a policy that is politically wise and is 18 months old.

So what were the causes of the storm? Here there are lessons for the Conservative leadership and for voters making a judgement on the degree to which the party has changed.

The night before his speech, Willets briefed political correspondents that the main interest in his speech was his support for Blair's city academies. He stated explicitly that the section on grammar schools was old news, part of the context in which he was backing the academies. So this was emphatically not a "Clause-Four moment", an attempt by the leadership to have a row with the party as a sign that it is modernising.

But still capable of plucking headlines out of context, the BBC Today programme decided to lead on grammar schools. Tory MPs awoke to headlines every 15 minutes stating that their party was opposed to them. The repetition of headlines has an accumulative impact. By the end of the programme, many were apoplectic and assumed wrongly that this was another worked- out stunt from the leadership.

To his pleasant and naive surprise, Willets heard his speech leading the news bulletins and was delighted. In his excitement he did not protest about the focus on grammar schools. The rest of the Conservative machine, used to an easy ride from the media, did nothing. It was only by the lunchtime that Cameron knew he was in the midst of a storm. For once, his charming façade slipped on the World at One as he protested that he was being asked about an old story.

No wonder his charm had gone. The bizarre sequence of events exposes the limits of his attempts to reform the Conservatives from top to bottom. At the top, the storms reflect partly a frustration among some shadow Cabinet members about the policy reviews. In that sense, Willets' strong support for city academies, but not the attack on grammars, was a pre-emptive strike before the completion of the education review. Another shadow Cabinet member calls the policy review a "dangerous combination of almost anarchic freedom for the review teams, which will then be followed by too much control from a small group at the centre".

And yet the centre is not as ruthless as it should be. Cameron and others believe they are following closely the path to power adopted by new Labour in the mid-1990s. They are only superficial followers. In the build- up to the 1997 election, Blair and Brown analysed every policy in immense detail before they made a public utterance. Always in advance they posed a series of questions: What are we trying to convey? How will the media respond? How will the party respond?

The current row is closer to that of late 1980s Labour, when Neil Kinnock hinted - sort of - that his party should drop a commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament and all hell broke loose. It is not mid-1990s Labour, when the shadow Education spokes-man, David Blunkett, stated casually that he had not ruled out VAT on school fees, only for such a policy to be ruled out ruthlessly on his behalf within minutes of his words being uttered.

Even so, some of the storms would still have exploded with more discipline from the centre. The Tory party and its newspapers have still to learn the lessons of three election defeats. Here they are again, right- wing columnists dancing with activists, almost joyful in their anger.

They are a reminder that Cameron cannot wave a wand and make an ageing reactionary party much more modern in the space of two years. From a Conservative perspective here is an entirely sensible policy, and the party goes bonkers. As Blair noted to me, the Conservatives are badly served by their own newspapers, which urge them to take vote-losing positions.

A storm over nothing has become important. Cameron must hold his ground, even if the gales forced him onto terrain he did not want to be.

s.richards@independent.co.uk

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