Calmer in a crisis
Time for the tech giants to dump their egos
One of the supposed problems with Old Etonians is that they hold too many positions of influence. Parliament is riddled with them, and 19 have called Downing Street their home.
The current Archbishop of Canterbury is an Old Etonian, and the second, fifth, 19th, 22nd, 24th, and 25th in line to the throne all went to Eton. They win Nobel Prizes, Olympic gold medals and Oscars, edit newspapers, present TV programmes, run hedge funds, command regiments, hold professorships, and sit in judgment in the High Court… But while Eton produces many pillars of the community, it also produces a lot of fraudsters, traitors, thieves, debtors, hucksters, rogues and rascals, too.
The school has spawned such figures for centuries, and the latest example is 42-year-old Alexander Nix, the now-suspended head of Cambridge Analytica.
In a spectacular sting operation by Channel 4 News, Nix was filmed informing a reporter posing as a prospective client what nefarious tactics he could use to help him win an election – entrapment, bribery, Ukrainian sex workers, shell companies, employees posing as tourists and research students, and, of course, the dissemination of fake news.
Although it should be stressed that Mr Nix has not yet been charged with breaking any laws, his ominous claim to “have lots of history of things” firmly places him in the darkly glamorous category of Old Etonian scoundrels.
It’s a type I recognise, not least because I was at Eton at the same time as Mr Nix. We do not know each other, but I would have put him down as an OE immediately, for the simple reason that Etonians don’t need to try.
His voice is well-spoken, but not too posh. He dresses well, but not ostentatiously. The manner is assured, but not smooth. Signet rings may be a little naff these days, but that’s the least of his misdemeanours.
There’s no doubt that Eton not only gave Mr Nix the polish and confidence to make a success of himself, but also the hubris to make him feel that he could get away with the more questionable aspects of his business practice. In essence, this is the biggest problem with some Etonians – they think the rules don’t really apply to them, for the simple reason that they make the rules.
As Harry Eyres, the ex-etonian writer and poet, tweeted on Thursday: “Perhaps Eton (my alma mater, so I speak with feeling) should teach ethics, as well as all the other things it teaches #Cambridgeanalytica”. Just the virtue of having been to Eton is in itself a justification for any form of behaviour. “If I am doing this, then it must be right,” goes the thinking, which can of course lead to outright criminality.
Such arrogance clearly informed Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal Party leader who was charged in 1979 with conspiracy to murder a man called Norman Scott with whom he’d had a secret gay relationship.
When Scott threatened to expose Thorpe, the Old Etonian matter-offactly discussed killing him, allegedly telling a fellow Liberal MP that “we’ve got to get rid of him… it is no worse than shooting a sick dog.”
There was a brazenness about Thorpe, which was surely matched by Jonathan Aitken, his fellow Old Etonian MP, who was convicted in 1999 for perjury and perverting the course of justice during a libel case he had brought against Granada TV and The Guardian.
Aitken, with astonishing hubris, had notoriously promised to “cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play”, only for it to emerge that he had lied to the court about his movements. He was subsequently jailed for 18 months.
Like so many Etonians, no doubt Aitken simply thought he could get away with it. And the sad fact is, many do. Take Sir Jock Delves Broughton, the Old Etonian baronet who was put on trial in Kenya in 1941 for the murder of his wife’s lover, Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, a fellow OE.
Sir Jock was part of the now infamous and louche Happy Valley set, and he soon became enraged by the very public affair between Diana, his much younger wife, and Erroll.
On the night of Jan 24 1941, Sir Jock slipped into the back of Erroll’s car and shot him in the head as he was driving to Nairobi.
Picked up by a friend, Delves Broughton returned home to burn his clothes, and at one point even confessed to the murder. But despite all that, he was acquitted at his trial.
That sense of somehow being above the law and the norms of society was also abundantly present in Guy Burgess, the Cambridge spy who defected to Moscow with Donald Maclean, his fellow traitor, in May 1951.
Flamboyantly gay at a time when most homosexual men kept their true natures a secret, Burgess drank and smoked heavily, and even dropped hints that he was betraying his country to the Russians.
The traitor would venerate Eton until his dying day – throughout his years in Moscow he insisted on wearing his OE tie on a daily basis.
There are plenty more Etonian rogues from the 20th century that could be named, such as Darius Guppy, the insurance fraudster.
Or then there is Lord Brocket, another insurance fraudster who is now a TV personality of sorts after being sentenced to five years in prison.
Or how about Victor Hervey, the 6th Marquess of Bristol, who led a gang of public school thieves known as the “Mayfair Playboys”, and who was imprisoned for three years in 1939 for stealing jewellery and a mink fur coat?
But Eton’s history has been peppered with such characters for centuries. One of the most notorious was William Parsons, an 18thcentury swindler and highwayman, who robbed those travelling west of London, and made a habit of shaking hands with his victims.
He was hanged on Feb 11 1751 at Tyburn, which made him – to the best of my knowledge – the only Etonian rogue to receive a capital sentence.
Numerous other Old Etonians from that period did find themselves imprisoned for running up huge debts, including no less a figure than Beau Brummell, the celebrated dandy, and James Fennell, an actor who was arrested for debt, and spent much of his life living by fraud in Paris and Philadelphia, alternating, in the words of one biographer, “between a palace and a prison”.
Eton also has the distinction of producing perhaps the world’s first grubby tabloid hack, in the form of Edward Topham, who started a paper called The World in 1787, which featured accounts of ‘‘elopements, divorces, and suicides, tricked out in all the elegancies of Mr Topham’s phraseology”.
At one point, the highly libellous paper sold 1,000 copies per day, but Topham was to close it after five years.
As long as Eton continues, you can be sure there will plenty more rogues and scoundrels to come. With this latest unsavoury incident, Alexander Nix is simply part of a great tradition.