James Delingpole: All students need a 'sense of entitlement' — ask my fundie friend Rupert

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ said John Lennon. Quite apposite from a man who — presumably — meant to spend a ripe old age staging increasingly embarrassing art happenings with Yoko Ono, rather than be shot dead by a nutcase. It also applies to the two things that most grabbed me on TV this week: A Very English Education (BBC2, Sunday) and the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones (available via Blinkbox).

The first, a follow up to Public School — the BBC’s 1979 fly-on-the-wall series about Radley — sought to find out what had become of its various stars. One of them, Rupert Gather, is now a very successful fund manager. Rupert is an old friend from way back. But though I knew he had served in tanks in the first Gulf war, I hadn’t been aware of his appearance in Public School as a sweetly bumptious 17-year-old filmed boasting about his plans to read English at Balliol. Becoming an Oxbridge reject is a hard thing for anyone at that age. (I was all ready to top myself.) Imagine, though, how doubly awful it must be actually to have a film crew there as you open your results letter, and to have the failure of your ambitions broadcast both to all your school mates and to every single PLU household in the land!

As you’d expect from the BBC, filmmaker Hannah Berryman’s implied subtext at every turn was: ‘They don’t half **** you up, those elitist, emotionally straitened, unnatural, all-boys private schools.’ Actually, though, from Rupert’s story I got quite the opposite message. Without that ‘sense of entitlement’ — which is really just a loaded, lefty chipster’s way of putting down someone who is ambitious and conscious of their worth — how are you going to have the drive to overcome all the obstacles that stand in the way of getting what you want?