Being a do-gooder did me no good at all

Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has a lot to answer for. Some armchair psychologists think the reason I turned away from journalism to become a free-school evangelist in 2009 is that I wanted to make my late father proud. He helped set up the Open University, among other things. No doubt there’s something in that, but it was also testimony to the influence of the charismatic Harvard professor, under whom I studied for a year. Sandel is a sort of secular Quaker and was always urging his students to eschew the temptations of worldly success and embrace the common good. That was the path to true happiness.

So thanks a lot, professor. I blame you for that disastrous wrong turning. Admittedly, I enjoyed co-founding four schools and will defend Michael Gove’s education reforms to the hilt. But my nine-year stint as a do-gooderended in public humiliation when Theresa May appointed me to the board of the Office for Students. The offence archaeologists went to work, dug up some sophomoric things I’d said years ago, and I had to resign from five positions, including my full-time job running an education charity. It was as if the custodians of the common good were saying: ‘Get back in your lane, Sunny Jim.’

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Sandel’s new book, The Tyranny of Merit, should come with a health warning. It’s the same message he drummed into me 30 years ago — show some humility in the face of your good fortune, think of others before yourself, try to be of service — but yoked to a critique of meritocracy. His central point, repeated ad infinitum, is that believing your status is a reflection of your true worth, rather than a function of who your parents were and what school you went to, turns the successful into egocentric monsters and the unsuccessful into aggrieved malcontents.