All four of Armstrong’s boys are at private school; the only time his bonhomie cracks is when Keir Starmer’s VAT policy comes up. “I’m feeling really, really angry about that, and extremely poor,” he says. “In our case, private school is the only place available for our children to learn music. Our 10-year-old has special educational needs, he couldn’t survive in the state system. We have chosen that not because we’re evil, and not because we want to buy a head-start for our children, but we want them to have as good an education as we can get.
“There’s a real anger towards private schools from some quarters and I find that so antithetical to everything I believe about society. There was something really vituperative about [Starmer] bringing it in in the middle of the school year. I loathe tribal politics. I’m allergic to it from the Right and scared of it from the Left. It felt really unpleasant and nasty.”
Then there is Starmer’s reform of inheritance tax on farming. “Another source of anger,” he says, before checking himself. “We’re farmers, of farming stock. We’re very much affected [by the changes]. But I had better not get into that.”