Pandora Braithwaite and the making of a Prime Minister

Our new prime minister Liz Truss is the first to have been educated in a comprehensive school (Roundhay School in Leeds); she held a junior ministerial position in the Department for Education between 2012 and 2014. So far, so hopeful for a shift in policy or at least tone from a Conservative government who have not appeared particularly sympathetic to the cause of nonselective state education. Sadly, Truss’s vision for an ‘aspiration nation’ includes new grammar schools popping up where there is demand for them. As the new Education Secretary (the ninth in twelve years) Kit Malthouse says, ‘We’re about parental choice, everyone needs to make a choice for their kids’. (‘Grammar schools expansion being ‘seriously’ considered by Government’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2022).

 The tale that Truss tells of her own adolescent political awakening includes a rather sad self-portrait of a clever girl who was isolated by her contemporaries (including her family) for not sharing their left-wing views and for daring to aspire to the gleaming spires of Oxbridge (Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, July 2018). Although Truss pluckily found her way to Oxford, she embellishes her school story with claims about less privileged peers who were ‘let down by the low expectations’ of left-wing teachers. Her memories of Roundhay School have been disputed by many, including her rival for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak. (‘Where did Liz Truss go to school? Why Tory leadership candidate’s education has caused row with Rishi Sunak’, https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-school-tory-leadership-candidates-row-rishi-sunak-1760697). Evidently, the Party that values the bootstrap pulling capacity of the individual lapped up Liz’s story of an old-fashioned girl who stood up to the popular crowd and fought her way out of the tree-lined hell of Roundhay.

Truss will have started Roundhay School in 1986, by which time I had crawled my way from my comprehensive school on Teesside to Leeds University (where Truss’s father was a Maths Professor). My partner had just bettered his ancestors on the Jarrow march by taking a solitary pilgrimage from his comprehensive school in Northumberland to Wadham College, Oxford. Oh, we had such pluck (and some decent teachers and full Local Education Authority funded grants).

Of course, Truss’s teenage years were during Margaret Thatcher’s administration and some significant shifts in education policy. The 1980 Education Act set up the assisted places scheme, providing private school places from public funds, increased the power of parents on governing bodies and, in principle at least, over admissions.These policies ushered in the idea if not the practice of parental choice over school places for their children. Choice was the ideological key word in the 1986 and 1988 Acts. To make schools more transparent and accountable to parents, the 1986 Act required local authorities to make public their curriculum policies and compelled governing bodies to publish annual reports and hold parents’ meetings. In a transfer of disciplinary authority to the family, corporal punishment was abolished in state schools. 1987 saw the abolition of the power to negotiate pay which teachers had held since 1965. The 1988 Education Act ramped up the shift from local authority control of schools with the establishment of the National Curriculum and further changes to admissions arrangements.

If families were led to believe they had more choice and control over schools, schools were told to uphold a particular model of ‘the family.’ The Local Government Act of 1988 (which aimed to loosen further the link between state schools and local authorities) included, in Section 28, the instruction that a local authority ‘shall not…promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’ (The edict was in force until November 2003 when it was repealed by the New Labour government).

We have not yet been furnished with Liz’s teenage diaries so can’t see if these policy shifts showed up in her daily English lessons and lunch breaks at Roundhay School or just how estranged she was from her peers. However, we do have fictional accounts of life in comprehensive schools in the 1980s, which may have informed Liz’s recollections of her own school days. By the time she went into first year, Phil Redmond’s brainchild Grange Hill, the first television serial drama set in a comprehensive school, was in its ninth season. The episodes which ran throughout the late 1980s (Truss’s high school years) are the most iconic and controversial of its 30 year run, and include the long-running storyline of Zammo McGuire’s addiction to heroin and the persecution of Danny Kendall by the authoritarian Mr Bronson, which ended with Danny’s death in the back seat of Bronson’s car. I can’t quite imagine twelve-year-old Elizabeth tucked up with a post-school hot chocolate, anxiously following Zammo’s smack journey; however, the headlines that Grange Hill provoked may well have seeped into her burgeoning political consciousness. For the right-wing press, Grange Hill was not fiction but a weekly dramatization of the worst imaginings of the 1970s Black Papers, which had railed against all aspects of ‘progressive’ education, but especially comprehensive schools.

An even less likely watch for adolescent Elizabeth is Alan Bleasdale’s Scully, which ran for seven episodes in 1984. Francis Scully is in his final year in the bottom set of a Catholic comprehensive on Merseyside, where unemployment runs so high that Scully’s friend Mad Dog hopes forlornly for ‘another war’ (like the 1982 Falklands conflict) to give him some prospects. The school staff include an incompetent replacement maths teacher who is driven to jump out of a classroom window to escape rampaging fifth formers, a chain-smoking drama teacher who tries to encourage Scully to try out for the school pantomime and a particularly vengeful caretaker who inexplicably ends up pairing up with Scully’s mum. Scully’s only ambition is to play for Liverpool FC, a dream so impassioned that it spills into his daily reality in imagined encounters with the team manager Kenny Dalglish. A long-awaited club trial ends in disaster when Scully underperforms in front of the actual Dalglish. In a bleak denouement, all of Scully’s attempts to escape from his chaotic family life, to find entertainment with his ramshackle group of friends or to find romance end the same way: with nothing.

Dramas like Grange Hill and Scully, and the well-worn social realist tropes that they draw upon, may well have helped shape the young Elizabeth Truss’s perception of the limited prospects of her comprehensively educated classmates. Moreover, her own teenage sensibility, as far as she has described it in recent interviews, is more reminiscent of another 1980s comprehensive school student: Adrian Mole. Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ was first published in 1982 and records the teenager’s life from 1st January 1981 to 3rd April 1982, the day that Britain and Argentina to war. The Secret Diary and the follow up, the Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (which takes him to age 16) were adapted for television in 1984 and 1985. Less social realism than comic social observation, family and school life are observed through the eyes of Adrian, an aspirational, anxious but kind adolescent, who veers between watching Play School and emulating Malcolm Muggeridge.(References to the text are to The Secret Diary and Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Penguin, 2017).

Adrian is shamed by his working-class life and by his parents - their relationship, his father’s unemployment and his mother’s employment. He is agonised by his on again off again relationship with Pandora Braithwaite. Adrian is largely overlooked at the Neil Armstrong Comprehensive, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, where none of the teachers ‘have noticed that I am an intellectual’ (18). Adrian has a keen sense of his place in the social order (above Barry Kent from the rough end of the council estate, below Pandora Braithwaite whose big house has ‘rolled-up wooden blinds’ and a ‘jungle’ of house plants (48)). As the Braithwaite’s paper boy, he notes they take the Guardian, Punch, Private Eye and New Society, while Pandora reads ‘Jackie, the comic for girls.She is not an intellectual, like me’ (48). Adrian reads widely and understands little: Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (‘…very old-fashioned. I think Jane Austen should write something a bit more modern’ (19)), Orwell’s Animal Farm (‘I am boycotting pork of all kinds’ (51)) Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch ( ‘It is full of dirty words’ (33)).

Like many teenagers, Adrian is erratic in his politics. While his dad votes Conservative, Adrian is an acute critic of Thatcher’s deindustrialised Britain: when visiting his mother in Sheffield he notes that ‘I didn’t see any knife and fork factories. I expect Margaret Thatcher has closed them all down’ (90). When Miss Elf  defaces the Headteacher’s portrait of Margaret Thatcher with a moustache, scrawls ‘three million unemployed’ across the cleavage and resigns (248), Adrian grieves her loss. ‘I will miss her’ he reflects,’ she was responsible for my political development. I am a committed radical. I am against nearly everything’ (248). Adrian is, in fact, a faint-hearted radical. He is delighted to be appointed a school dinner monitor and later a prefect. When he inadvertently starts a uniform protest at school by getting suspended for wearing red socks (he couldn’t find any black ones) he finds a compromise to appease his Headmaster’s warnings against ‘non-conformism’ and to fit in with his more rebellious peers on the protest committee (including Pandora) : ‘We wear red socks underneath our black socks. This makes our shoes tight but we don’t mind because principle is involved’ (121). His commitment to the cause is rewarded first when Pandora becomes his girlfriend and second, by a gift from her parents. The Braithwaites are members of the Labour Party (Mr Braithwaite on the Bennite wing), and they pass on to Adrian a copy of The Ragged Trouser’d Philanthropist. Adrian receives it with his usual acuity: ‘I’m quite interested in stamp collecting so I will read it tonight’ (116).

In further installments of his diaries, Adrian leaves his radicalism behind with his red socks, and as an adult lives a precarious and largely apolitical life as a writer (of sorts). Pandora, meanwhile, escapes the confines of Neil Armstrong Comprehensive and makes it to Oxford University, and later becomes an MP - uncannily like our current Prime Minister. Unlike Elizabeth Truss, Pandora keeps up the family alliance with the Labour Party, and, like her father, occupies the left wing of New Labour. Pandora Braithwaite seems very much like the kind of popular left-wing girl Liz defined herself against at secondary school. In fact, is Pandora Braithwaite the defining force in Liz Truss’s political life, who has propelled her to the highest office? We can only hope for the publication of The Secret Diary of Elizabeth Truss Aged 13 3/4 to find out. Reality, after all, is stranger than fiction.