There is still a disappointing acceptance among too many less advantaged people that they should, in fact, know their place. And the place for working-class children is in the state system, however inadequate that may be. They too easily accept what they are given: only the middle and upper classes enjoy the privilege of wrestling with the choice of private education. As for health care, everyone is meant to accept that “rationing” is inevitable, even good for the soul.Mr Grant’s intervention has exposed a lie: the notion that dissatisfaction, ambition and desire to achieve is essentially middle class. A man who has so often been pilloried as Barmy Bernie has become the first modern Labour politician to legitimise an appetite for self-improvement, a desire for ordinary people to get the best for themselves and their children. Harriet Harman exposed her own guilt-ridden struggles and that of Labour- supporting professionals.

Bernie Grant did more: he liberated an authentic anger at underachievement felt by the great mass of voters.This energy was harnessed by Margaret Thatcher, whose policy of selling council houses ditched Labour’s paternalism and acknowledged that the wish to own property was virtually universal. But Thatcherism’s appeal to ambition and aspiration palled: it tipped over into an association with greed. It did little to provide ordinary people with better education. Meanwhile, the Nineties recession and housing slump suggested that Thatcherism had offered empty promises.Now Mr Grant has opened a road for Labour to express personal ambition – a word which, in British society, and left-of-centre British society in particular, has been made to seem vulgar and unattractive But Bernie’s message poses many problems There is Britain’s anti-aspirational culture to overcome.

We are more interested in failure than success (just think how the Duchess of York’s amazing success in raising $4m has been belittled).Prejudice still shuts people out of many jobs where connections, accent and colour of skin play an insidious role in determining who gets to do what. For all the Prime Minister’s talk of creating a classless society, his image of warm beer and cricket on the village green recalls a static, class-ridden country.The process of diminishing potential starts early. Mr Grant is not the first parent to complain about lack of drive instilled by schools “The staff believe the kids won’t make it,” he said. “They don’t encourage the kids to fix their aspirations high.”These problems are graphically illustrated in sport, whose chief institutions, be it the MCC or Wimbledon, remain riddled with outdated snobbery that excludes rather than encourages a great deal of potential talent.

Combined with the anti-competitive ethos that has overtaken the school sports system, Britain is in the second division of sporting nations, in just the same way as its economy has already slipped down the table.People collude in their own underachievement. Parents who have been let down by their own education often fail to expect the best of their own children, and so the cycle of underachievement carries on. It belongs in that wide list of things that the English churches now believe without anyone else noticing that they believe them. Families show a marked and frequently unreasonable preference for their own members. William Temple said that the Christian churches were the only institutions that existed for the benefit of people who are not members.

It follows that public policy cannot be conducted by wholly Christian principles, since the political world is composed of institutions which do exist for the benefit of their members, and shrivel if they forget this.This is not a startlingly new conclusion. It was after this engagement that, on the recommendation of the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, he was awarded his DSC.In 1946 Thomas joined the Joint Intelligence Bureau, which was then replacing the wartime Joint Intelligence Committee as the agency for Central Intelligence analysis. He once said that he would never forget the terrible sight of the Scharnhorst glowing red-hot throughout, from stern to stern, in the Arctic darkness in the minutes before she sank. In this capacity his knowledge of the German navy’s signal routines and of Bletchley’s cryptanalytical procedures was called upon during many operations off the Norwegian coast and on the Arctic convoy routes, and not least during the operation in which the Home Fleet destroyed the battle cruiser Scharnhorst in December 1943.