
Sir Keir Starmer’s Private Passions appearance is part love-letter to music, part soft-focus politics. He’s evidently warm in his advocacy of music education, but the committment is light on detail, for all the obvious reasons.

An article about a family spending £150,000 on music lessons plays to the gallery of outrage — but overlooks what really matters: the quiet disappearance of accessible, public music education, and the values it instils in young people.