The PM's wife, blind trust and the biggest issues of the past few days

Am I the only person who is totally uninterested in this latest frenzy around the moral probity of Cherie Blair? What on earth is all this investigation for? What exactly is the "bigger issue"?

I can honestly say that among the acres of stuff generated by the media over the past 10 days, there has been not a crumb of information about the Prime Minister's wife that hasn't been glaringly obvious for years. The general charge seems to be that Mrs Blair is economical with the truth, especially when it comes to privilege and advantage for herself and her family. Don't we know that already?

The Blairs, it has been quite obvious since we first heard of them, are far more concerned with what things look like than what they actually are. Their principles are what other people are expected to live by – but not them.

They believe, for example, in comprehensive education. But for their own children comprehensive education has only ever been a fig leaf. The elder offspring have all attended two of the most highly rated state schools in the country, even though there is no geographical, let alone ideological, reason for this choice.

The Blair children attend a school selected by them for its academic record. No playing strictly by the rules for the Blair family. It is for other parents of middle-class children to take a leap of faith, sign up to a "bog-standard com" and raise levels of attainment by becoming involved in the school. In fact, since Labour came to power, it has been for other parents to get together and force the end of the era of state grammar schools by raising petitions to trigger ballots. Yesterday, however, we learned that "other parents" have not been ideologically committed enough to trigger change, and may need a little forcible help.

It turns out that the hapless Estelle Morris had instituted a review of policy on education some while ago, and that Charles Clarke has followed up by telling all education authorities that have kept the 11-plus to review their admissions policies. Mr Clarke told MPs "selection regimes inhibited educational opportunities". But actually, as the Blairs clearly are aware, you don't need the 11-plus to run selection regimes. You can do it from the kitchen table at home. And if you can't manage that, because of local council restrictions, then you can move the kitchen table, and the home surrounding it, into a more favourable catchment area.

The Blairs didn't need to resort to this, but can there be any doubt that they would have done so if necessary? After all, tales of huge debts run up by students, of students working so hard to put themselves through college that they have no time to study, have simply prompted the Blairs to buy more advantage for their own offspring.

The eldest boy is to be spared any of the privations of normal students because mummy and daddy's blind trust has provided a home for him. (People suggest that the Blairs have abused their blind trust but, if you ask me, there's been too much blind trust chez Blair, and not too little.) I can't help wondering if some of the rooms in these flats will be rented out to student friends of Euan's so that they can work to pay his way through college as well as their own. Frankly, since I've never taken the Blairs on blind trust myself, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Whoever Euan shares a flat with, we can be sure that the lucky young people in question won't be drawn from among the ranks of the 13 million individuals living in homes with incomes below the main poverty threshold. The grim news this week from the Rowntree trust is that Labour is well on track to miss its targets on reduction of child poverty. The ambition – hardly a lofty one – was to reduce child poverty by a quarter, or by 1.2 million children. Even that left 3.6 million children under the breadline, but in fact the figure is more likely to top four million. And these, on the whole, are the ones in schools the Blairs wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

Children of some of these families are likely to be hardened truants. The Government's new wheeze is an £80 spot-fine for the parents of such children, levied by headteachers, or "repo-heads", as we will no doubt be calling them soon. I can't help feeling that a place at the London Oratory, and a driver to take them there, might help these children quite a lot more.

Failing that, what such children do need is nurturing and sympathetic environments as alternative places of education, rather than the austere pupil referral units to which parents are nevertheless often eager to get their kids admitted because they have no alternative. There are, apparently, some such places. I was astonished to meet a woman some weeks ago whose son was at a state boarding school in the countryside. There seemed to be no particular reason for this, other than that it suited the parents, who have been privately educated themselves – natch – and knew exactly how to milk the system in the name of "principle". Yes, there's plenty of selective education going on in the state sector, but now it's all about what you know and how you can get it, rather than what mark your child gets in a test. Selective education is now called parental choice, and it leaves matters in the hands of the well-informed and affluent more than ever. We need more state boarding schools, where the children of parents who find it hard to cope can escape from the chaos at home without care orders being waved about. In fact, we need all sorts of schools, geared up to cater to all sorts of social difficulties, instead of the present bleak divisions between the good, the fair and the awful.

Yesterday, in the face of the closure of special schools up and down the country as part of the Government's inclusion policy, a national organisation was established to co-ordinate local campaigns. Even for children with autism, a condition that responds well to specialised attention, parents are left with little option but to send their vulnerable children to a mainstream comprehensive.

The current thinking means only the severely disabled should not be educated in the mainstream. But parents who understand how hard the knocks are when a child is not accepted by their peers know that such a policy, while theoretically fine and dandy, is unworkable. Even when the child's educational needs are being well catered to – often a big if – the social difficulties of a disorder as seemingly easy to cope with as dyslexia can kill confidence and blunt potential.

All these issues – poverty, grammar schools, special schools – have been in the news in the last couple of days. But these things are hardly discussed at all, because somehow it has been decided that the minutiae of exactly what was involved in securing a flat for an undergraduate is a great deal more important. No wonder Mrs Blair thinks that she and her children are more significant than everyone else. The nation's press seems to be in no doubt that that is the case.

d.orr@independent.co.uk