Professional jealousy

 Few words now carry such tiresome connotations as ‘Eton’. Although the Prime Minister and some of his closest colleagues are Etonians, the British press considers it a dreadful disadvantage to have been educated there, especially if one wants to go into politics. This prejudice has seldom been challenged since Iain Macleod’s ‘magic circle’ article appeared in The Spectator on 17 January 1964. The philosopher Jonathan Barnes once told me that it was no advantage in the early Eighties to have been to Eton if you wanted to get into Balliol: ‘On the contrary, there was a pretty strong prejudice against public schools. I should say it was the college’s policy — powerfully urged by some tutors and implicitly accepted by most — that, other things being equal, a candidate from an “unfavoured background” should be preferred to one from a favoured background (anglice: prefer the rotten schools to the good).