Education, education… vacation? If you’re Gillian Keegan, it’s one or the other

It is at this stage entirely impossible to tell if there is anyone in the Conservative Party still holding out any hope or even desire of winning the next general election. Trying to interrogate the things they say and do is like analysing the swimming skills of a fish on land. They writhe about, they leap up, in desperate cries if not for help then just for attention. But they know it’s pointless.

Does education secretary Gillian Keegan – the fifth holder of that role in the last 12 months – care about what might be the likely response to her suggestion that, actually, a private school education costs less than a family holiday?

She made that claim in the House of Commons, while attacking Labour’s plans to charge VAT on private schools. It is, inevitably, a crowded field, but it remains at least a possibility that no one, not even in these last mad years, has said anything in that little oak-panelled room that is capable of bearing less scrutiny.

Boris Johnson, remember him, is no longer an MP, mainly because he claimed not to have known about parties he personally attended. It was concluded this statement was so palpably ridiculous that he could not possibly have unintentionally misled the Commons.

So, what of this one? “Most of our private schools aren’t like Eton or Harrow,” she said. “They’re far smaller and they charge a lot less. Many cost the same as a family holiday abroad and there’s plenty of parents who choose to forgo life’s luxuries to give their children these opportunities.”

There is no claim you can’t make through the pointless device of price comparison. If you take a private jet to Las Vegas and stay in the Empathy Suite of the Palms Casino Resort, you could rack up the cost of one entire Eton education in just a long weekend.

If you’re the former foreign secretary, Liz Truss, you could put two children through the school, for just the half million it cost for you to go by private jet to Australia to have your picture taken holding an umbrella.

But then, there are some other numbers which are more pressing in this regard. For example, only 7 per cent of children go to private school. It does not seem unreasonable to conclude that a very high majority indeed of the remaining 93 per cent can’t afford it.

It is possible that these people don’t need to be told by their government that if they are one of the very lucky ones who can still afford a week in Tenerife over the summer, then by doing so they are ruining their children’s life chances.

That apparently there are other families, sitting down and going through the numbers. “What are the average private school fees darling? Sixteen thousand is it? Ah right, okay. Well, cancel the fortnight in the Maldives and I reckon we can just about make ends meet. Ah, what’s that. Ah bugger, yes. We do have two children don’t we. I always forget that bit. The Ngorongoro crater will have to go as well. What a pity.”

Still, by placing this calculation in the public imagination, Keegan is likely to have done the private school industry a huge favour. By the year 2023 – yes 2023 – the summer holiday has already become a thing of the past, what with the entirety of mainland Europe being too hot to visit in the months of July and August.

Whether children will be happy to discover that a) there’ll be no holiday next year, b) say goodbye to your friends and c) you will now have to wear this straw boater on the bus is highly questionable.

Keegan reckons that Labour’s plan to charge VAT on private school fees is simply the “politics of envy”, which is the word Conservatives traditionally use to describe what everybody else simply calls “fairness”.

Still, by the year 2025, she will certainly be free to book herself a very long holiday indeed. Though she might wish to spend some money on some extremely basic numeracy lessons instead. A holiday and a private school education are very much not the same thing.