“YOU can take the boy out of Eton, but you can’t take Eton out of the boy.”

How else to explain David Cameron’s desperate braying attempt to find a riposte to Jeremy Corbyn’s reminder to the Prime Minister that even his own mother has signed a protest petition against the effects of the government’s cuts agenda.

Far more important than the harm done to millions by George Osborne’s capitalist austerity policies, according to silver-spoon Cameron, is that Corbyn should wear a proper suit, do up his tie and sing the national anthem.

By launching an ad hominem broadside against the opposition leader, the PM shows that he has no answer to Corbyn’s criticism.

Some MPs have tweeted their anger and shock at the personalised attack on Corbyn, but he is quite capable of standing up for himself.

He reminded the House of Commons that his own mother, like others of her generation, fought to establish and defend the “principle of a health service free at the point of use for everybody,” which remains the jewel in the crown of the postwar Labour government.

And while NHS founder Nye Bevan had to fight against the embittered opposition of Cameron’s party and the British Medical Association of the time to introduce our people’s health service, things have moved on.

Even Tory prime ministers have to pretend to subscribe to NHS principles to win an election.

And the BMA has experienced a genuine change of heart over seven decades so that it and its members have become staunch advocates of the NHS ethos they once rejected.

That’s why junior doctors in England, represented by the BMA, are engaged in a bitter battle with Cameron’s Tories to demand a freely negotiated, fair and, above all, safe contract.

In contrast, the government is happy to smear the reputations of the BMA, junior doctors and MPs who support them, misrepresenting their case and suggesting that junior doctors are motivated principally by greed.

According to Cameron and his walking disaster of a Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the Tories are reacting to a spike in unnecessary deaths at the weekend by highlighting the need for a seven-day NHS.

The PM even traduces Bevan himself, dragging his name into the controversy by declaring that “he’d want a seven-day NHS because he knew the NHS was for patients up and down our country.”

For the umpteenth time, when will Cameron get it into his head that we already have a seven-day NHS?

Consultants, junior doctors, nurses and all other NHS committed professionals work Saturday and Sunday shifts, dealing with accidents and emergency operations as well as day-to-day care of patients.

They don’t carry out elective surgery at weekends because there is insufficient funding to finance the staffing levels an extra two days a week of such treatment would require.

The junior doctors, who, let it not be forgotten, voted overwhelmingly — by 98 per cent — to reject Hunt’s unsafe proposals, have preferred negotiation and have come to agreement on many points.

But they are adamant that they will accept neither Tory diktat nor a contract that would threaten the security of those whose lives they are pledged to save.

Ministerial obstinacy has forced the BMA to announce another three 48-hour strikes to bring the government back to the talks table.

If the governments in Scotland and Wales can avoid provoking junior doctors over contracts, it cannot be beyond the wit of the Tories to make amends for the mess in England that is of their own making.