"Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" - which people always seem to attribute to Oscar Wilde, like so many good quotes, but in fact it was Matthew Arnold, taken from La Rochefoucauld, who wrote "Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu."

It strikes me there is an awful lot of hypocrisy around, in many of the attacks which have been made on Diane Abbott for this. I don't mean here - I'm meaning politicians and media types who are happy to buy privilege for their own children, and who have been rejoicing at putting the boot in here.

It strikes me that she was damned either way. Either she'd send her son to a local school which she believed would fail his needs, in whcih case she'd be attacked as a hypocrite for subordinating her son's intersts to her own political ambitions; or she'd buy him a privileged education that she believed would be better for him, and be excoriated for that, in the light of criticisms she had previously made of other politicians who had made similar decisions.

The paradox is that, for all we know, sending her son to a posh school rather than to a local school might not prove to be the best thing after all - but then those are the kinds of risks all parents take whatever decision they make about such things.