I have no objections to a headmaster undertaking this kind of action.

I went to school just outside Henley on Thames at the time when Boris Johnson was our MP. He occasionally came in to talk to the sixth-formers about politics, but really it was nothing more than "you're all at private school, you should be thinking all about politics, all the time - vote Tory" and a lot of his older style of jokey-liberal bashing.

This was way before the Conservatives as a party realised they needed to switch their stance on liberal social issues, such as gay rights and equality, in order to appear somewhat progressive and not alienating.

I recall a gay schoolmate (in the closet at the time) ask Boris what the Conservatives planned to do about furthering gay rights and Boris, quite off-the-cuff, said something very close to "we have no interest in these kinds of issues, they're irrelevant and a circus show".

A top politician came into a school, completely unaware of who was asking questions and why, and proceeded to damage that person's self-confidence and trust in politicians because he told a gay student that his concerns were nothing more than a "circus show".

Fast forward 10 years, and I'm now a journalist. Here's the thing. Had a journalist been present to report what Boris had said, he'd have been held accountable, in a media sense, for what he said. He would have had to deal with gay rights groups etc calling him out for talking to school kids like that.

He would have had to consider that just because he was talking to school kids, most of us could vote at the time, he was not in a boys club where he could get away with making jokes and disrespecting serious issues because they didn't follow the party line.

How I wish I had recorded the whole thing on my phone back then.