Mail on Sunday coughs up after being schooled by MP

‘SPECIAL REPORT’, blazed the Mail on Sunday on July 5 this year, over the bylines of reporters Glen Owen and Eirian Jane Prosser. “The Labour MPs and ministers keeping quiet about their private education (including one who went to Eton)”.

The paper then went on to “out” a number of MPs who, they said, had attempted to hide their private education by not citing their almae matres in the pages of Who’s Who – at a time when the party was imposing VAT on public schools.

“The Mail on Sunday analysed Who’s Who and found that Catherine Atkinson, the Derby North MP, did not fill out the education section to inform readers that she attended £63,900-a-year Benenden School,” it tut-tutted. “Her entry was limited to a sentence about her pre-parliamentary career as a barrister.”

This prompted Kevin Hollinrake, the Conservative Party chairman, to fume on cue for the paper, saying: “Their hypocrisy knows no limits.”

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“While they plot around the cabinet table to impose this spiteful tax on education, many Labour MPs have been busy covering up their own private school educations,” he said. “They have no shame in pulling up the ladder behind them.”

Alas for the paper, though, the reason why Atkinson didn’t declare her private school education is, er… she didn’t have one. She attended Sacred Heart high school, a Catholic comprehensive in Hammersmith, west London, and has now won not only an apology and correction from the paper, but a pay-out – which, no doubt to the Mail’s chagrin, she is using to fund scholarships for local law students at the University of Derby who – like her – attended state schools.

The Mail’s mealy-mouthed correction read: “An article in the first edition of last week’s Mail on Sunday said that Catherine Atkinson MP was privately educated. In fact, Ms Atkinson has never attended private school. We apologise for the error.”

For her part, Atkinson responded: “I am grateful for the state-school education that helped me build a 17-year career as a barrister.”

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“The claim that I had concealed a private education from my constituents was false,” she added. “I am using the money from this settlement to support students from Derby’s state schools in beginning their own careers in law.

“There are students in Derby today who could spend their careers defending the rights of others. They deserve the opportunity to build that future.”

At least £5,000 from the settlement after expenses will go towards the Catherine Atkinson future lawyers award, providing a £500 award each year for at least 10 years. The award will be open to first-year law students who were educated at a state school within the city of Derby.

Curiously, neither Owen nor Prosser is keen to make their own schooling public. Prosser’s is absent from her LinkedIn profile, while Owen – known as Domestos at the Mail as he shifts the unsavoury stories dreamt up by executives that the paper’s ordinary hacks leave behind – is widely assumed by colleagues to have been raised by wolves.