Welwyn Hatfield MP Grant Shapps was keen to put the exam record straight when he talked recently to Welwyn Hatfield Times editor Terry Mitchinson.

THERE was, if I recall correctly, a bit of a mini-media storm last year when the Tory Party chairman was accused of amending his O-Level exam results on ‘Wikipedia’ when he became a new MP.

The incorrect entry, he said, read, “obtained four O-Levels including an A in CDT”.

Grant bumped into my esteemed boss Terry Mitchinson the other day – at the sod-cutting ceremony for the New QEII Hospital – and told him his old school had provided him, without prompting, a copy of said report to put the record straight.

Terry tells me: “Grant said his crime was to try to make the entry accurate. He had (wrongly as it turns out) thought he’d received five O-Levels, though with a B in CDT.

“In fact the old report card showed, much to his surprise he said, he had actually received six O-Levels.”

One of them it turns out, maths, he took a year early.

Hardly a sparkling school record, as Grant himself pointed out, “especially given my U in combined science”, but still, Meynard is happy to set the report straight.

As an aside, it appears the school had made its own mistake. The report shows Grant as being born in 1969 rather than 1968.