Is anti-Etonian prejudice really OK?

Don’t you wish Angela Rayner would come off the fence, just once in a while, and tell us what she really thinks?

In a meeting of delegates to the Labour Conference, the heiress presumptive to the Labour leadership is reported to have said of the governing party: ‘We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum: homophobic, racist, misogynistic… banana republic…vile, nasty, Etonian…piece of scum.’

I’ll let the purity-police in her own faction take Ms Rayner to task over the orientalist and patronising stereotyping of communities in the Global South as ‘banana republics’. What bothers me, if I’m going to speak my truth, is the way in which ‘Etonian’ appears as the last and by implication most iniquitous in her laundry list of moral abominations.

A person chooses, at least arguably, to persist in homophobia, misogyny and these other forms of horridness. Those are defects of character. To be an Etonian, on the other hand, is a condition you acquire ineradicably, in the innocence of childhood.