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).’

This preference for rotten schools has if anything become stronger since. It is one of our democratic pieties: a way for the chattering classes to show that we too share the craving for equality which is so deep a part of the democratic spirit. In this world of egalitarian ­gesturing, Eton becomes an indefensible relic of ­privilege: a means by which plutocrats ensure that their children get an unfair advantage. Other schools where the fees are just as high get off relatively lightly, because they are much less well-known, and because the share of the glittering prizes each one of them carries off is so much smaller. Harrow and Winchester have faded from politics, though Westminster has not. My own school, Uppingham, was mentioned in passing when Labour tried to paint the Tory candidate in the Crewe by-election as a toff for having been ­educated there: an attempt which naturally failed.

The greatest damage done by anti-Etonian prejudice is not to Eton.