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 damage done by anti-Etonian prejudice is to the rest of us. Instead of being pleased that someone like David Cameron went to a good school, we hold it against him. On reading the future Mayor of London’s school reports, I could see that his housemaster, Martin Hammond, was an outstanding teacher as well as scholar: how can anyone but a philistine regard this as a bad thing? Yet pundits who went to Oxford, but not to Eton, tend to find it irritating — an offence against the natural order of things — that anyone started out in life with even greater advantages than they started out with themselves.
The British public does not care much one way or the other about Eton, and is prepared to judge politicians without reference to where they went to school. But the Oxford-educated columnist who went to a less famous school is inclined to think that while he or she has a wonderful insight into what life is like for ordinary people, an Etonian must be deficient in that respect.
The attack on Eton is a small symptom of a much wider problem: the condescending assumption in liberal circles that the past cannot have much to teach us, and the resources of tradition cannot prove equal to the challenges of modern times. An old foundation must be inferior to a new one; any relic of feudalism is irrevocably tainted; the world began a few years ago and nothing which was created before, at the earliest, 1945 can equal the new world which we are painstakingly constructing on more morally defensible lines. Even educated people can succumb to this idiocy.
On visiting the US, which people tend to think of as a modern country, one finds everywhere a pride in the past, and in that country’s 18th-century constitution, itself fed by the accumulated wisdom of earlier ages. On this side of the Atlantic, the past is seen, at least in modish circles, almost as an embarrassment, like a cranky old relative who is best left unvisited. The study of any history earlier than, say, the Russian revolution or the Nazi tyranny is treated as the kind of irrelevant antiquarianism with which we should not trouble our children. They are denied an initiation into the best that has been thought and said, and Eton’s advantages are magnified.