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'Took Starmer down a peg yesterday,' I tell my wife. 'Oh my God. He is proud of that. What is wrong with you?'

From the diary of Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister

THE papers say it was my best PMQs yet. I arrive home and the door’s locked. ‘No prime ministers of poor countries,’ my wife says on the intercom. 

She’s such a joker. It’s just that, coming from very different backgrounds, her jokes tend to have a harder edge than mine and verge on cruelty. ‘Akshata?’ I said. ‘Oh alright come on up,’ she said. ‘But no work talk.’

I’m not currently allowed in the big kitchen or to use her personal chef, because she said if I want to work for a bloody living I have to live like it. But I dial up some Deliveroo and join her in the anteroom.

‘Gave Starmer a real hiding,’ I told her, not unreasonably pleased with myself. ‘He may have been a QC, but he tied himself in knots on private schools.’

‘Oh my God, you’re serious?’ she said. ‘He’s serious. You made the puffy-faced solicitor trip over his words a little and you are proud. What is wrong with you? What did I marry?’

‘But -’ I said, wrongly, because she hadn’t finished. ‘Bad enough you’re an MP. Bad enough you’re chief money-launderer for Johnson. Now you’re prime minister and having silly little arguments like a neighbour on Coronation Street. I am so ashamed.’

I draw myself up to my full height. ‘Now Akshata,’ I say, but she still hasn’t finished. ‘You did do the favour for my father? On China? You are some use, surely.’

‘Yes,’ I say, having lost my train of thought a little. ‘You said you’d watched my speech? I told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet that the golden era of UK-Chinese relations was over.’

‘It was on in the background,’ she said. ‘I hate those Mayor things. Nothing sadder than cheap opulence. And you said the golden era of UK-India relations was just beginning?’

‘I didn’t quite get there,’ I admitted. ‘You have to know your audience.’ ‘And I have to know my idiot,’ she replied. ‘Wonderful. Now I have to call Daddy and say you let him down.

‘By the way your Deliveroo is here. Get a job with them, why don’t you?’

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There is a new racism. And it is directed to parents and pupils at fee-paying schools

By Abigail Pennson, our reasonable, plain-speaking middle-class columnist slightly to the right of Hitler

THEY’RE meant to hate racism. The left, the woke, the warriors of social justice. But this racism? Fine with them. Be as prejudiced as you want about private schools. 

Why, they’re barely human, those pupils lined up neatly in smart uniforms. They should be wiped off the face of the earth for learning Latin in beautiful old buildings. Eradicate them.

Does it matter that they’re merely children? Children with responsible parents who dare to dream of betterment? Parents who’ve scrimped and saved and gone into debt?

Of course it doesn’t. Up against the ivy-covered wall of the fives court with the lot of you. The class warriors have a point to prove, so you must be machine-gunned like Russian royalty.

Because that’s what Sir Keir Starmer’s sad little tax grab is doing. By stripping the schools which have educated our inventors, our entrepreneurs, our ruling class for centuries of their charitable status? He is decapitating Britain.

He is drawing targets on the back of every child and parent who dares pay fees for school, and loosing his Twitter attack dogs. ‘Tear them apart,’ says jolly old Keir, ‘so I may smear their blood on my face and win socialist votes.’

Already Oxbridge colleges are ashamed to accept decent applicants, pretending to prefer instead a handful of B-grades from 18-year-olds already pushing double prams.

Next will be our institutions – the City, the civil service, the RSC and the ENO bowing to regional accents and being good in a scrap outside a council estate pub.

Racism? Alive and well. Segregation? Back in fashion. Exclusion and condemnation to lesser careers and social death? Thumbs up emoji.

Well, war on the cut-glass accented classes at your peril, Labour. Because the cut-glass will cut you back.

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