Michael Duffy on the rise of Highbury Grove’s most famous headteacher.

Discipline, for Rhodes Boyson, started early. His first teacher, amazed that he could read but could not number, thumped him till he cried. In the playground he was introduced to “purring”: the old Lancashire sport, he says, where contestants took turns to kick each others shins with the steel tipped clogs they wore until one of them gave in “for lack of moral fibre”. At six or seven the infant Boyson tried it, “for the favours” - he was Victorian even then - “of a damsel”. The big boys had to step in to separate the bleeding combatants. Honour satisfied.

His childhood left its mark in other ways. It was a nonconformist home, he says, a strict background and tight discipline that made for his success. What made all the rest? In these early pages his father - a self educated cotton spinner and local labour party figure - is a baleful, brooding presence. Big, morose and taciturn, he withdrew for days on end in bouts of black depression. He never played with his only child. Once briefly, an evacuee from Salford brought Rhodes companionship - “but the bombing ceased and she went home”.

He failed the exam to the local grammar school (it was the only time his father ever struck him) and his family found the fees to send him there. He enjoyed it but achieved no great distinction. Then, in the late war years, he joined the Navy - more discipline. Demobbed, he took his first degree at Manchester, returned to Rossendale where his father was now an alderman, and began to teach.

His rise was rapid. Before he was 30 he was offered a secondary modern headship in the town next door and there are some revealing insights here to the force of personality, energy and ambition that drove him at this pace. Useful courses, tough discipline and high morale were what he promised; with “the stick, will power and compassion” he set about it. Politics was useful too. He was a local labour councillor, but he itched increasingly to stride a bigger stage, and in 1960 he made the move that was to take him ultimately, by way of the East End, the Black Papers and Highbury Grove, to Parliament and heady draughts of fame.

He took two possessions with him: unswerving self belief, and the papers of the 19th century cotton manufacturer Henry Ashworth, that would earn him, in the next few years, his invaluable PhD. Ashworth was an associate of Bright and Cobden, a classical liberal of the Manchester school, “a man of immense influence and personality”. Both ideas and style rubbed off on Boyson: by 1968 he was a free market conservative, sensing the winds of change and railing at the follies and disorders of the time.

He was already at Highbury Grove by then (“at the carriage trade end of Islington”) tirelessly writing, driving, punishing, brandishing success. Revealingly, he describes the school as his aircraft carrier: a ship to command, a base for his political and educational sorties. He stood for Eccles in 1970 and then waited impatiently for a seat that he could win. His chance came in 1974: in the March election he became MP for Brent. With characteristic chutzpah he told ILEA that he would run the school part time until the right successor was appointed, and was aggrieved when they turned him down.

The rest, of course, is history. Ever more conspicuously Victorian in politics and appearance, he made an immediate impact on the Tory benches. His views - on schools and testing, capital punishment, immigration, taxation, moral fibre - endeared him to the right wing of his party. He had the populist’s ear for a telling phrase and the unshakeable conviction that he was right. In 1979 Mrs Thatcher made him junior minister for education. Other ministerial posts would follow - social security, trade and industry and Northern Ireland, local government and the poll tax. None of them, though, was the top job that as “a natural number one” he wanted and in 1987 he returned to the back benches, not without some consolation.“Few people, within a few days, become both privy councillor and knight”.

This section of the book, it must be said, is disappointing. One reason is that there are few new insights; mostly it is the old certainties that are reasserted, and the old villains that are re-paraded .. . the Schools’ Council, NFER, the GCSE, peace studies and the loony left. In a book that is rich with images of violence, the end of corporal punishment, particularly, is viewed in apocalyptic terms. True, there are nuggets of pragmatic common sense - but the omniscient and self righteous tone is always too intrusive. Hugo Young, in a cutting surprisingly included, describes it well: “blunt, impatient, and imbued with astonishment at the failure of anyone in the world to see that the great unbarbered Boyson is right.”

The other reason is that it is Highbury Grove that really dominates. “I had a set of views,” the author writes. “Highbury Grove was the living embodiment of those views in education. ” We hear at length about the views; we don’t hear very much about the institution they created. It was certainly popular - and in media-conscious Islington Boyson skilfully built on that - but how successful was it? Good schools need more indication of their progress than a partial tally of A level grades, and more enduring symbols than the rolled umbrellas sported by the 5th form prefects. What did those “less academic” pupils, of whom Sir Rhodes had such modest expectations, get from this school? And how would girls have faired? This, after all, is where the great debate has led us. It seems a pity that Sir Rhodes, for all his influence in the politics of education, has not told us in this too expensive book more about its practice.

Michael Duffy is head of King Edward VI School, Morpeth, Northumberland.