Berating different parenting styles? Fust hold your horses

A family living in north London is seeking a £180,000-a-year tutor to mould their one-year-old son into an “English gentleman”, so that they can hopefully wave him off to Eton, Winchester or Harrow in 12 years.

- CHARLOTTE CRIPPS

The advert, which went viral online and in the papers this week, requests a tutor from a “socially appropriate background” (read: impoverished posho in need of a well-paid job), who is blessed with an “extensive vocabulary”, and speaks in received pronunciation (RP).

The right person for the job should also be qualified to work with “ultrahigh-net-worth and royal families” (so no complaining when your Christmas hols are cancelled at the last minute because they need you to fly to Switzerland) and must be au fait with institutions such as the Pony Club. Applicants are now scrambling for the lucrative post that involves immersing the child in “quintessentially British experiences” and wheeling his buggy around museums.

While many other parents, including myself, will have been concentrating on baby-led weaning, or reading their child lift-the-flap books by Julia Donaldson, this family want the boy’s early years shaped with trips to Lord's, Wimbledon and Twickenham, to teach him an “age-appropriate understanding of cricket, tennis, rugby and other sports such as equestrianism (including polo) and rowing”. Phew, short shrift for Tumble Tots.

“Good grief. Poor kid,” one person wrote. Someone else said: “Sounds like a home as full of warmth as an igloo in the Arctic on a particularly cold day.” Another commented: “Those parents sound insufferable.”