In defence of Cameron’s posh boys

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Spectator cover story about David Cameron’s purge of the posh. My peg was a new wheeze from the Cameroons whereby prospective employees should be asked not just where they went to university, but about their childhood and parents’ assets etc. The idea was to make sure that too many posh people didn’t make it to the top. Sinister, I argued, and not meritocratic. Judging people on their merits means not marking them down for being poor or posh. Inverted snobbery is still bigotry, and ought to be deplored as such. And yet the government was proposing rolling it out, first with the civil service and then….

…the government hopes other employers will follow:  Deloitte, Accenture, O2, Linklaters, KPMG, Barclays and others are supposedly on board. The BBC says it will start asking new employees about family background. So this kind of interrogation — ‘When did you last see your father’s payslip?’ — might become the norm.