In comparison to America, Britain has a very small black middle class. The Oprahs, Cosbys, Powells and Rices of Britain are few and far between. Unlike Barack Obama's children, the majority of black Britons depend on the state for their education. Few manage to get to the best universities or go on to populate the professions and corridors of power. Some middle-class people believe it is one's duty to "support" the state sector by sending one's own children into it, despite having the financial resources to do otherwise. Seek not what is best for your own child, but what is best for society. Apparently, sending your little cherub into an environment where he can be bullied and threatened or, at best, just not learn very much, is somehow to do what is "best for society". Such thinking is now so endemic that it would simply be unthinkable for David Cameron to send his children to private schools, and expect to remain prime minister. Yet across the pond, a Democrat president who thinks nothing of privately educating his children is adored by the very same Britons who sacrifice their own children to the state sector every day.

Perhaps Mark Chamberlain should have done as many middle-class families in this country do: send his son to a state school to uphold a political ideology. Elsewhere, parents sacrifice holidays, expensive dinners and frivolity to pay for their children's school fees. In Britain, people sacrifice their children in order to justify their political beliefs. 

But somehow, like Obama, members of the moral police permit Chamberlain to send his son to a private school. They quietly forgive the indiscretion and are able to rejoice in his son's success. Black families who can afford it are increasingly choosing to educate their children privately. They don't feel a warped sense of duty to society that would force them to abandon their children to second-best. And society forgives them. It even forgave Diane Abbott for sending her son to a private school when she had vocally defended state schools for years. 

Perhaps it's cos they is black, innit?