‘I went to a great school,” David Cameron used to say, “and I want every child to have a great education.” While the second statement had to be taken on trust, like his late-onset “life chances strategy”, the first was accepted as fact. Whatever you might or might not like about David Cameron, there was no question that Eton was a great school and he went there.
True, some thought it odd, given what a great school it was, that David Cameron did not know the meaning, when asked by David Letterman, of Magna Carta, but since then the stream of Latinisms emitted by Boris Johnson – last heard chuntering “obiter dicta” at an unimpressed press conference – has confirmed that a classical education isn’t everything. And tellingly, even Johnson did not know the Latin for “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.
No, other, more mysteriously inculcated qualities must explain why, disregarding equally qualified candidates of both sexes and sublimely indifferent to appearances, Cameron preferred his staff to be Etonian. Closest was Ed Llewellyn OBE (his “pocket Talleyrand”).
But proving his inclusiveness where Eton year groups were concerned, Cameron hired his non-contemporary George Young, also Oliver Letwin, Henry Bellingham, Jo Johnson, Boris Johnson, Rupert Harrison, Kwasi Kwarteng, Jesse Norman and, before he disappeared without trace, the Conservative candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith. Apologies to any Etonians I have overlooked.
As if any further confirmation of its greatness were needed, Eton is again proving its worth, in rising above the reputational damage a lesser school might have suffered had some of its brightest boys, carelessly left unsupervised for a number of years, committed similar acts of vandalism, then run away. For if there is any firm lesson to be drawn from six years of Cameron, at the risk of sounding Etonist, it is to never vote Etonian. Or not until the school can produce better evidence than Boris Johnson that its stated Eton Aims truly foster “perseverance, tolerance, integrity”. Cameron’s set let themselves down, they’ve let us down, but worst of all, having demonstrated, so dramatically, the potentially calamitous downsides of an Eton education, they don’t seem to have let the school down at all.
You would never guess, from the confidence of the current provost, Lord Waldegrave, that a number of Eton boys – they know who they are – have developed the foul habit of xenophobia. He continues, imperturbably, to advise on best pedagogic and equality practice. “At Eton,” he informed Peter Wilby last week, “we have appointed a full-time director of outreach to find not just gifted and talented children – we don’t want to be creaming off as the grammar schools did – but also those in boarding need.” There is hope, then, for the poor boy who dreams, one day, of a prime minister giving him a job for which he is fabulously unqualified.
Though by no means the first to fetishise an Eton education and to promote its products, Cameron may however be unique in believing his preference to be compatible with another of his projects, his “aspiration nation”. On occasion, admittedly, he was able to combine both.
Oliver Letwin, the old Etonian who was placed i/c Brexit having tipped government papers into a rubbish bin, is a perfect example. Where some might see only a pitiful, shambling figure, condemned by his own racism, Cameron responded, as a Conservative should, to someone who wanted to “get on in life”. Moreover, as Letwin himself has stressed, his was by no means a privileged Etonian experience, for his parents had an old car, which was once spotted by cheering fellow pupils. “One of the things Eton taught me,” Letwin has said, “was not to be in any way embarrassed about being poor.”
The school had plainly changed, then, since a yet more prominent old boy, Cyril Connolly, described, at self-loathing length, his abject cultivation of “the ape-like virtues without which no one can enjoy a public school”. Connolly, himself, possessed them; his more talented friend, George Orwell, did not. Not all Etonians, then. “The art of getting on at school,” Connolly wrote, in Enemies of Promise, “depends on a mixture of enthusiasm with moral cowardice and social sense.”
Maybe, once Cameron happened, Boris Johnson became inevitable. In a documentary about the latter, we learned that Johnson, two years ahead of Cameron, would still refer to him as “Cameron Minor”. Another story had the two of them wrestling for possession of some briefing papers.
Out of respect for minorities, not least the Winchester alumni still more favoured on the left, it should be stressed that Connolly’s concluding thought on Eton is not restricted to former boarders from his own school. His Theory of Permanent Adolescence holds: “That the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development.” It follows, Connolly continued, “that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual”.
Boarding schools having changed, dramatically one hears, Connolly’s remarks probably have no bearing on Cameron’s adolescent, school-minded etc record in government, ditto Johnson’s. But his reservations should perhaps raise questions about a free boarding place at Eton, where they still dress like Connolly, as the ultimate reward for a promising underprivileged boy.
Though the costumery, being superficial, is not the most eccentric aspect of a school that was nonetheless advertised, in Cameron’s time, as an example to maintained schools that are not fastidiously selective nor determinedly bereft of girls; that do not charge £32,000 a year, promise GCSE classes of below 20, or possess an £18m debating chamber in which to coach the Letwins and Rees-Moggs of the future.
Waldegrave, critiquing the national curriculum from his (other) office in Coutts, is just the latest sage to discover how easy it is to repackage his public school’s undoubted assets as a model for all. No matter how absurd or Marie Antoinetteish – one thinks of the former Wellington head, Anthony Seldon, advocating happiness lessons to schools that have sold off their playing fields – a respectful hearing still awaits any head of an elite private school bearing inspirational hints for the maintained system.
The annual headmasters’ and mistresses’ conference can be relied on for a feast of constructive criticism, where less affluent schools are concerned, and no responsible state school head will want to miss a contribution from the Brighton College visionary, Richard Cairns. Among his recent themes: schools that recklessly encourage anti-German sentiment. Michael Gove picked Brighton College as the platform for one of his more deliberately teacher-baiting speeches in which, long before his own would be fatally stress-tested, he urged the importance of building character.
But it was Eton, above all, which Cameron promoted in government. His Etonian policy adviser, Jesse Norman, explained that Eton was special: “Other schools don’t have the same commitment to public service.” Thank Christ for that.
