Shami Chakrabarti ran away from questions yesterday about her son’s schooling after being confronted by revelations in Heat Street.
The recently-elevated Labour peer would not deny claims that she tried to get her son into Eton College when cornered at the Labour Party conference.
Heat Street revealed Baroness Chakrabarti’s encounter at the elite school back in August. A source told us they saw her with her child at an entrance exam several years ago – despite her overt Left-wing credentials.
Chakrabarti repeatedly dodged attempts to put the story to her, and hung up the phone when Heat Street tried to ask.
Yesterday she fled the question again – this time from Channel 4 News correspondent Michael Crick.
Crick confronted Chakrabarti in an attempt to highlight the mismatch between Labour figures’ commitment to comprehensive education and their tendency to send their own children to fee-paying schools and grammars.
When Crick confronted Chakrbarti (4mins 45secs in the below clip), she refused to answer, instead snidely saying: “You’ve been on the internet too much of late.”
She has studiously avoided commenting on the story – a tactic she also employed when rumours were swirling about her impending peerage.
Chakrabarti dissembled over the reward – timed suspiciously to coincide with her whitewash anti-Semitism inquiry into Labour – in interview after interview, despite knowing the story was true.
Elsewhere in the clip, Crick pursues another Heat Street story, in which we pointed out that shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry will likely stay quiet in the grammar schools debate because of her own children’s selective schooling.
Thornberry tried to defend herself by saying that “all parents would do the same thing” – but essentially admitted that she has one standard for her own family and another for everybody else’s.