With Labour’s deputy hopefuls preparing for their ordeal by Paxman on Newsnight tonight and Tony Blair on his farewell tour of Africa it’s the Tories who are once again making the headlines.

The conventional thinking is that this should be harming Cameron. I’m not so sure. The notion of a grammar school is from a bygone age and the Graham Brady looks like just the sort of Tory that the leadership are not going to worry about sacrificing.

He’ll have his fifteen minutes of fame and this little fracas will just become a couple of paragraphs at the end if his Wikipedia entry – and that will be that.

Mike Smithson