Yesterday, a delightful lady with whom His Grace has had the most fulfilling of relationships over many years decided to ‘out’ herself. And she did so at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham where she received a standing ovation.A link to ‘To Miss With Love’ has sat upon His Grace’s blog ever since he discovered her existence. She did what all good bloggers do: find a niche, tell it like it is, often letting the heart rule the head, challenging her readers in eloquent and creative prose. Her posts were infrequent, but each one a sparkling jewel upon the blogosphere’s plate of cold baked beans.
Miss Snuffy, as she was known, posted here; His Grace posted there. It will be seen in the right-hand column that Miss Snuffy even credited His Grace with influencing her political development. She wrote:
You have made me appreciate Conservative thinking. I had always believed right-wingers to be evil, selfish, and mean individuals. You, however, are Conservative and delightful. I will indeed be voting Conservative in the next election – your influence in particular has led me down the path of taking an interest in what the Right has to say.
And so this former Marxist did indeed vote Conservative at the last general election. And she instantly became a darling of conference, with The Guardian, The Times (£) and the Daily Mail all wanting a slice.
Her speech is available on BBC iPlayer (forward to 1:17). It is a superlative account of the manifest deficiencies in the state education system and the root causes of its chronic failure to meet the needs of our children because ‘it keeps poor children poor’ and teachers are too ‘blinded by leftist ideology’.
And now Miss Snuffy, aka deputy headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh, has been forced to take down her blog (it would be quite impossible for her to write about students now that her school has been identified). And she has asked His Grace to bid farewell to her ‘Blogsville friends’.
To have come out as both Miss Snuffy and a Tory on the same day has been more than a little traumatic for her, especially with all the paparazzi and consequent press intrusion. While we can now put a delightful face to ‘To Miss with Love’, her loss to the blogosphere is acute.
She would like her friends and many contributors over her blogging years to know that it is they who brought her to where she is: that when the newspapers asked what helped her in her evolution, she credits blogging and ‘the people she met in Blogsville’. She says: “I want to tell them how grateful I am.”
As we are to you, Miss Snuffy.
Ms Birbalsingh.
Katharine.
Good-bye. You will be missed.
Though it is quite likely that you will be Baroness Birbalsingh before too long.
