THIS week I went to a packed church in North London to say farewell to a very great man. He was Ray Lewis, 61, my former deputy mayor of London, former prison officer, former priest — and one of the most inspiring teachers I have ever seen in action.

There were hundreds of us in that congregation, singing, clapping, cheering our praises of Ray’s life and work, and of course there were many of his former pupils.

One after the other they came to the front and explained what Ray had done for them, how he’d changed their lives. They wept tears of gratitude.

They came from some pretty tough parts of London, and some of them — young black boys and girls — had grown up without father figures. If things had gone differently, they could have been sucked into London’s gangs. They could have been victims of knife crime, bleeding out on the pavements — in the resurgent plague that has just been chronicled, in these pages, by Harriet Sergeant. They could have been another statistic on the wretched record of Mayor Khan.

Each of them, however, had been blessed by Providence, and somehow referred to East Side Young Leaders Academy — a kind of boot camp Ray founded more than 20 years ago in a modest-looking hall in the Borough of Newham. There, under the tutelage of the booming-voiced but diminutive Guyanan, those kids discovered discipline.

Ray gave them such selfconfidence and ambition that they went on to win places and scholarships at some of the best schools in the country: Rugby, Lancing, Eton, Sherborne School for Girls, City of London, and others. They went on from these schools to some of the best universities in the world.

From tiny beginnings, East Side Young Leaders Academy has nurtured cohort after cohort of kids, so that there are now 1,300 alumni out there already, and with three more academies, and growing partnerships with private schools, there are more and more young people who have been scrambling up a ladder of opportunity that was invented by Ray Lewis.

I sat there listening to those tributes, and I wondered if there was ever an educational mission so noble and so fine.

Surely no one could be so blinkered or so crabbed as to want to kick away that ladder. Surely no politician would ever be so foolish as to make it more difficult for those young people to fulfil their potential. Would they?

Oh, but they would. Never, ever underestimate the sheer spitefulness of the Left, their relentless desire to seek out the tall poppies and scythe off their heads.

The truth is that for the past 20 years the London lefties have resented Ray. They have deplored his methods. They have moaned about his parade-ground discipline. They have whinged about his jokes — and his utter refusal to be politically correct.

By various ruses they have repeatedly tried to frustrate his ambitions and to close down his school — regardless of the needs of his charges. They resented Ray because he was the living, breathing repudiation of their miserablist socialist ideology.

Their message to those kids was that their fate was sealed at birth, and that their chances in life depended utterly on their class, their race and the whole ineluctable socio-economic matrix of their background.

Ray’s message to those kids was totally different. Ray said, No. He said, to hell with all that Lefty fatalism. Ray told them they could achieve great things.

He believed — as I do — that you will find talent and potential pretty evenly distributed in our country; and he thought that it was his job, with his unique formula, to unleash that potential.

Those young leaders could feel the sincerity of his belief in them — and of course that made them believe in themselves; and that is at least partly why they succeeded academically, and continue to succeed in so many walks of life.

For two decades the formula has worked, and the programme has expanded, because the feepaying schools were willing and increasingly enthusiastic partners, subsidising East Side pupils, and many others, in a process that has been expanding to the point where 20 per cent of kids at Eton have some sort of financial assistance in the form of scholarships or bursaries.

Any sane person would surely want this type of support to continue. I want more and more young people to get their foot on that ladder of opportunity, because that is what I mean by levelling up — and that is one of the reasons I am now really dreading the prospect of Keir Starmer and Labour.

If they get in, they are going to do something that Tony Blair never did, because he was much too sensible. They are going to hit the fee-paying schools with VAT at 20 per cent.

This is pure vindictiveness. It will cripple some schools. Of course we want to improve all schools in this country. Of course that is by far the most important thing we can do in politics — which is why the government I led poured in so much cash, lifted starting salaries for teachers, funded teachers to go to schools and areas that really needed them, expanded the academy programme and much more besides.

But how does it help all these schools to crucify the relatively small fee-paying sector?

It will do nothing to raise standards or attainment, not in a single classroom. It will do nothing to improve our national productivity, or add a penny to GDP. Quite the reverse.

It will mean that fee-paying schools are forced to sell more and more of their places to affluent kids from overseas, so that young people in this country find it harder and harder to get in.

By walloping these schools with a 20 per cent tax, Starmer will make it much tougher for them to provide the very scholarships and bursaries that have helped kids like the pupils of Ray Lewis.

You have to wonder why Starmer is doing it, why he is being so

For two decades the formula has worked

It makes my blood boil with rage

destructive and un-Blairlike and hostile to aspiration.

Is it for the tax revenue? Of course not. The sums raised would be fiscally trivial, and subject to the law of diminishing returns, since the tax would tend to put schools out of business.

There are some who think it is just a gesture to his Lefty backbenches, and that Starmer — who attended a fee-paying school — will find an excuse, once in office, for not going ahead. I fear it is worse than that.

The terrible truth about Starmer is that he is way to the left of Blair, and in attacking these schools he is revealing his true colours, and the true instincts of the Labour party today.

They want to punish excellence. Tories want to promote excellence everywhere.

Labour wants to level down. Tories want to level up.

It is clear that Starmer’s Labour party want to take away opportunity from those who need it most.

When I think what a Labour government would mean for the life-chances of those kids in Ray’s academies, it makes me boil with rage.

Starmer’s lot just want to punish aspiration — and they must not be allowed to succeed.

As for Starmer himself — who benefited from a bursary at his private school — how utterly monstrous that he should now make it so much harder for schools to offer exactly the same kind of financial help that gave him such a crucial leg-up in life.