The previous prime minister got to Oxford via Eton, and before that went to the same prep school as princes Andrew and Edward. Posh.
Theresa May, famously and proudly, is not so posh. She too went to Oxford, but she got there by a route that was not so smoothed by family cash and privilege.
She went to a state primary followed – strangely, perhaps, for a vicar’s daughter – by a spell at a Catholic convent. But it’s her secondary schooling that’s really interesting.
At 13 she won a scholarship to Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school set in delightful grounds a few miles from Oxford. Just two years later, the school went comprehensive. In came the boys, and all the local kids who’d failed their 11-plus exams.
You can see that this might have been a shock – might even have seemed a disaster – to the nice grammar school girls. Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s surely relevant to May’s attitude now to selective schooling.
It's beside the point, but I rather like the fact that on its Wikipedia page the renamed Wheatley Park School lays claim to model Laura Bailey, actor Dominic Rowan, motorbiker Bradley Smith and the rock band Supergrass before it gets round to mentioning that the Prime Minister also went there.
As it happens, Theresa May and I were in the same school year. Like her, I went from a comprehensive school to a place at Oxbridge, which was rarer then than now. And like her I had some grammar school experience first – five years to her two. Moving to a comprehensive for the sixth form was an escape.
The whole experience left me with a very different attitude than the one revealed by May. And though I don’t for a moment doubt her honesty and care on the subject, I think I can fairly claim to know something about it too.
My parents devoted much of their lives to the cause of comprehensive education - Dad as a headteacher, Mum chairing a large county education committee, both as school governors. They would have been dismayed by May's plan to turn back the clock.
May spoke on Friday about “a future in which Britain’s education system shifts decisively to support ordinary working-class families”.
It’s a worthy ambition. And it’s certainly true that the post-war state grammar school system had some notable successes, including some fine writers, a number of my friends – and a quarter of May’s Cabinet.
But what about those left behind, the ones rejected at 11 by the selection system? A system which - even if you approve of it in principle - was often little better than arbitrary.
May also said: “Every child should have access to a good school place.” Every child. Not just the bright ones, not just the ones whose parents have books around the house and read them bedtime stories.
The crux is that word “access”. She can’t mean everyone should go to the same good school. That would be comprehensive, not grammar. So she must be talking about opportunity. There’s another word for opportunity. Chance.
And if there are “good schools” to be aimed at, what does that say about all the others?
The school where I took my A-levels had been a secondary modern. Its very first sixth-formers were in the year above me. There were just a handful of them, but they had all got to Advanced Level after being written off at 11 as not grammar-school material.
The old system had let them down. The school turning comprehensive gave them another chance. Another opportunity. Access to higher things.
None of that year made it to university – I was the first from the school to do that. But when I got to Cambridge I met students who didn’t have the brains or the work ethic some of those 11-plus failures had shown. What they had was family, cash, “good” schools – and, in so many cases, a totally unjustified belief in their own superiority.
One of the weirdest things about May's enthusiasm for grammar schools is that the Tories' own former Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, thinks it's weird. And there are reports that Justine Greening, who was appointed by May as Morgan's successor, is unhappy with it. Greening herself is comprehensive-educated.
All this, along with the timing of it, suggests the whole thing is little more than a bee in May's personal bonnet.
I'm sure she's well intentioned, on this issue at least. I'm equally sure she's got it wrong.