The Guardian ran with an interesting article yesterday — albeit one that blatantly played to the foibles of its natural readership — highlighting the number of Conservative MPs likely to be elected in the next election which will have been educated in independent schools.

At the last count, 52% of the Conservatives’ so-called “A-list” of prospective candidates had been privately educated.Among likely new Tory MPs whose education is a matter of record, 43% went to independent schools. Among the same group, only 36% would have gone to comprehensives, compared with 88% of the population at large.

All this feeds into one striking statistic. After next year’s election about a third of all new MPs will have been to fee-paying schools, compared with 13% of new arrivals when the Commons last underwent major change in 1997.

Most of this data is to be found in The Class of 2010, a report put together by the lobbying firm the Madano Partnership, based on work by academics from Plymouth University. The research suggests that relative to 1997, the number of new MPs from comprehensive schools will fall from 46% to about 30%; and that 17% of the new intake will come from grammar schools, despite only 5% of pupils attending such schools.

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The arrival in power of Cameron and his circle will be heralded as a return to more well-heeled Tory stereotypes. In that context, the arrival of so many privately educated newcomers will be of a piece with the general mood. Politics will feel much posher.

The Madano Partnership profiled 242 of the likely next parliamentary generation, and focused on the Conservative candidates who will have to make it to the Commons if the party is to win a majority. There is a smattering of Old Etonians, including millionaire campaigner Zac Goldsmith, Tory intellectual Jesse Norman, and Rory Stewart, once a tutor to princes William and Harry. The ranks will also include at least two alumni of Harrow, and three from Radley College, along with old boys and girls from Highgate, Millfield, Winchester, Charterhouse, Stowe and Roedean.

To which the question the Parallax Brief asks is, so what?

The Guardian report laments the lack of representation, arguing that Dave has been at pains to try to sculpt a “Conservative parliamentary party that looked more like Britain”. Why should it look more like Britain in terms of gender and ethnicity, the Guardian’s argument goes, but not in terms of education?

Two points. First, the Parallax Brief has already gone on record in saying that discrimination of any kind, even that favouring those who must struggle harder in life to achieve because of a variety of social and educational disadvantages, is morally wrong. He has nothing more to add to that other than to say that beyond the moral scope, it is surely the case that favouring comprehensively educated candidates will be a horrendous, asinine example of simply treating the symptoms of the disease rather than the illness itself. The real problem is social mobility, and having more comprehensively educated candidates in the Parliamentary Conservative Party will contribute exactly nothing to the cause of creating true meritocracy in the United Kingdom.

Second, what would really be best for the country would be having the best people for the job representing their constituency in Parliament. Jesse Norman and Zac Goldsmith will surely add to the intellectual vigour of the Parliamentary Conservative Party and the Commons. Why should the location of their education matter?

The Guardian is right to point out that the system could be changed to improve social mobility. One of the examples it gives is that many parliamentary and public policy interns, a surefire — and perhaps these days compulsory – route into Parliament, remain unpaid, which genuinely excludes the less wealthy. That’s a commonsense proposal that Parallax Brief could get behind — Choosing MPs based on anything other than calibre and popular vote, on the other hand, is nonsensical and something he can’t support on any terms.