Update 5th August: Congratulations to soon-to-be Baroness Chakrabarti…
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While we wait to hear whether Shami Chakrabarti has been offered a life peerage by her close friend Jeremy Corbyn, or whether she wants to answer questions about the latest anti-semitism row engulfing Labour, a curious tale about her has come our way.
It seems this most right-on of anti-establishment figures tried to send her son to Eton College.
A source has told us: “I took my son to Eton to sit the entrance exam a couple of summers ago and was very surprised to see Shami Chakrabarti there accompanying her son. There is no question it was her. I had assumed Shami was so Left-wing that Eton was possibly the most offensive four-letter word known to her, but obviously I was wrong.”
Heat Street has tried to contact card-carrying Labour member and Corbyn ally Chakrabarti on several occasions to discuss this but she either isn’t available or won’t return calls.
Corbyn, himself a pupil at fee-paying Castle House prep school many moons ago, is fiercely against selective education. His opposition to sending his son to a grammar school famously cost him his second marriage.
Yet some of his closest friends in politics have links to private education. His spin doctor, Seumas Milne, was educated at Winchester College; and Diane Abbott sent her son to City of London School – having criticised colleagues in the Labour Party including Harriet Harman for sending their children to selective schools.
Whether or not Chakrabarti’s son made it to Eton is not clear, but her instincts appear to be the same as Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, who sent his daughter to the £29,000 a year Atlantic College.
Even Corbyn’s closest comrades turn up their noses at what the utterly charming Alastair Campbell described in 2001 as the “bog standard comprehensive”.
