Ed Balls went (briefly) to Eton, the place Tory policy is made

As the dust settled on the class warfare battlefield after Prime Minister’s Questions and the Prime Minister’s attack on how Tory policy is invented on the “playing fields of Eton” a mildly embarrassing fact pops up.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls went to Eton.

He was only five years old. It was only for a term. He lived there – but went to school down the road at the state primary.

Balls Senior was on a job-swap scheme with an Eton “beak” who replaced him for a term at his own academic post in Norwich. So the Balls family, young Ed too, decamped for three months to a school master’s house in Eton, dad donned the bow tie each morning and taught the boys. Not his happiest posting, Ed Junior recalls.

John Rentoul profiled Balls earlier this year in GQ:

But his father’s views on education were not predictable. For a term in the early Seventies, he taught at Eton on an exchange scheme between the school and university. [Ian] Gibson says he harangued Balls Senior: “I tried to stop Mike Balls doing this sabbatical when I was on the university senate.

I said, ‘What’s going on here? Here’s the man who fought the 11-plus bloody well going to Eton.'” Balls told him to get lost, Gibson recalls. “We used to bounce off each other all the time.” They are still firm friends and Norwich City supporters. So the Balls family moved to Eton and Ed, five, started his schooling at a state primary in Windsor. His father had to wear a white bow tie every day, although he had to get Ed’s mother to tie it.

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