The politician was Margaret Thatcher and the Department Of Trade And Industry (the website calls it Transport and Industry which looks like a typo as transport was the Ministry of Transport) paid 50% of the cost for schools purchasing computers from the Research Machines 380Z, the BBC Micro plus (I didn't know this) the Spectrum.

https://briansmithonline.com/computing/national-curriculum/c...

Placing this under the DTI, instead of Ministry of Education, suggests the intention was to encourage success stories precisely like yours; build skills for future employment in industry and building IT literate professionals to enable future UK trade. Surprisingly forward looking for any government department!

We were lucky enough to have both the 380Z and the BBC Micro (plus some Acorn Atom's as budget alternatives and a number of Apple ][ that pre-dated the whole computers in schools program) plus ECONET ! Our Computing Department head was involved in setting up the program, so we lucky and got a bit of almost everything except the Spectrum. We also had a few different languages available, Comal, Pascal plus the obvious BBC BASIC. I also got to play with a BASIC Compiler (Apple ][ Expediter if I recall the name correctly). I was incredibly lucky as a result of the teacher being involved in setting up the program and the early Computing courses and examinations.