New Eton motto: It’s cool to be common
Former student from great British institution says latest generation from school ‘has gone street’
IT IS the school that has become a byword for privilege, cultivating heirs and princes, 19 prime ministers and Jacob Rees-mogg.
But a new generation of wealthy Etonians has decided it is “cool to be common”, according to a former pupil who claims the venerable institution now produces “Streetonians”.
Hugo Engel, who made headlines in 2016 when he and 10 fellow students were granted a private audience with Vladimir Putin and were pictured larking about at the Kremlin, has written an article for Tatler magazine in which he claims that “Eton has gone street”. The boys style themselves after London street gangs – albeit a very mild version – and favour expensive streetwear over traditional tailcoats, Mr Engel writes. They use street slang to communicate: a “peng ting”, for those unaware, is an attractive young lady with whom one is keen to make an acquaintance.
The same trend can be seen at Harrow, where pupils’ Facebook accounts mix pictures of the school cricket team with homemade rap videos.
“A sea change has been washing over public schools, and leading the charge is Eton, where certain boys now think it’s never been so cool to be common. To mitigate the stigma of privilege, Etonians are abandoning their red trousers and elongated vowels in favour of streetwear and glottal stops. These students – who may have been brought up in historic houses – aim to give the impression that they grew up on a very different kind of estate. They are, in fact… the newest generation of the most well-connected and well-respected families in Britain,” said Mr Engel. “Resented and respected in equal measure, these are the children of the Old Etonians who, 40 years ago, might have been cavorting around Windsor in tails. Their progeny are now lounging in tracksuits and posing with gang signs for social media or smoking vapes ordered online and shipped from the US.”
The apparent reluctance to admit to an Etonian background comes after Boris Johnson’s resignation left the Cabinet in the rare position of having no Old Etonians.
Mr Engel lists diamond stud earrings, Reebok trainers and “high-end” tracksuits as the top fashion choices, and grime artists as role models.
“The lingo is London slang peppered with idiosyncratic ‘Eton speak’ only intelligible to an elite segment of the school’s society”, but it can be quickly abandoned when the situation demands: “Streetonians may be able to adopt the ways of the urban youth when it suits, but they also have the privilege of effortlessly displaying their polished upbringing when it is to their advantage in other situations.”
‘A sea change has been washing over public schools, and leading the charge is Eton’
When Boris Johnson resigned as foreign secretary last month, he accidentally created a small piece of history. His departure means that, for the first time ever, we have a Conservative Cabinet with no
Old Etonians in it.
Out of (by my count) the 52 British prime ministers, 19 have been Etonians. They begin in 1721 with our first, Robert Walpole, and end with our most recently departed, David Cameron. Along the way, they include Pitt the Elder, Wellington, Gladstone, Salisbury and Macmillan – quite a big part of our island story. Sitting beside such leaders around the Cabinet table have almost always been several ministers from the same school – seven or eight under Macmillan, six in Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet (although only two in her last). And although Tory and Eton blue have naturally blended, Etonians have also found their way into Labour Cabinets: there were two, for example, in Clement Attlee’s great socialist administration of 1945. Now there are none, even in a Tory government. Does it make a difference to anything?
It is worth asking, in passing, why there were so many Etonians at the top of politics. The broad answer, of course, is that British government has mostly been carried on, until recently, by the upper classes. But that does not fully explain the specific dominance of Eton. Why, for example, has the great and ancient school of Winchester not furnished more leaders? Among prime ministers, it has produced only Henry Addington, of whom it was said: “Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington.” In more recent times, it has come up with the excellent Geoffrey Howe, but also Oswald Mosley and his fellow extremist, Jeremy Corbyn’s righthand man, Seumas Milne. Rugby produced only Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. True, Harrow nurtured Winston Churchill, but he was intended for Eton. He was forced to go to Harrow because its high hill was considered better for his fragile health than Eton’s riverside. Churchill sent his own son to Eton.
No doubt I am showing my prejudices here: I am, I must admit, an Etonian. But it is at least worth considering that Eton may have had some traditions which assisted its pre-eminence. These include an understanding of the way the world works, an education that puts a high premium on being able to argue and perform in public, and an encouragement of independence that fits pupils to lead and take risks.
Indeed, the school has not lost these qualities. Eton still swarms over prominent positions. The present Archbishop of Canterbury, the present head of the Army and our next king but one, as well the actors Hugh Laurie, Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston, all went to the school.
In today’s global meritocracy, Eton attracts outstanding pupils from all over the world. When I was a pupil there, the place still had plenty of nice-but-dim sons of country gentlemen. Nowadays, the brain level is much higher. Despite being so traditional, Eton is ruthlessly modern in its competitiveness. In fact, I am surprised, now that there is, in effect, a quota for women in top jobs, that Eton has not decided to increase its possibilities for future dominance by admitting girls. It also offers bursaries to more than 20 per cent of pupils these days, so money is less of a barrier than it was. It would be a mistake for Mrs May (who seems instinctively to dislike talent, and has certainly done little to promote it) to close off her party’s Etonian supply on principle.
But if we are to live in the more open society that Mrs May says she seeks, where talent can find its true level, how well are we doing? It is notable that the only set of people in British history which succeeded in challenging public-school predominance is itself receding into the past.
From 1964 until today, we have had only two public-school prime ministers (Cameron and Blair). The rest – Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Major, Brown and May – were educated at grammar schools (the sole exception being Jim Callaghan, who went to a non-selective state secondary). Yet grammar schools continue to be so shunned by policy elites that Mrs May has dropped her vocal support for them. We have not yet had a prime minister from a comprehensive. This must in part be because the comprehensive mentality was – and perhaps still is – wrong. It has not worked nearly hard enough at unlocking potential.
The tragic sense of gifts unused was most beautifully expressed, oddly enough, by an Etonian: the poet Thomas Gray. His most famous work, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, is a meditation on what might have been: “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” He imagines, lying in the unmarked graves around him, “the village Hampden” who resisted local tyranny, the “mute inglorious Milton” whose verses were never written – people who, because “their lot forbade”, could never command “the applause of listening senates”.
Even today, more than 250 years later, the lot of many millions of people still forbids them, leaving far too many flowers to blush unseen. This is one of what Mrs May originally called “burning injustices”. It burns not because good educational institutions hold lesser ones back, but because bad ones are satisfied with low standards and blame their difficulties on “elitism”.
The endless attack on Oxford and Cambridge over failures of “access” for poor children and ethnic minorities ignores the great efforts those universities actually make. It avoids the question of why so many schools still prepare pupils so poorly for higher education. It does not confront the wilful poverty of expectation that was endemic from the first in the imposition of comprehensive schools. There are signs that free schools, pushed so successfully by Michael Gove a few years ago, will help to change this, but it will be another generation before they produce a prime minister.
In the intervening gap, expect Etonians to re-emerge in Conservative politics. One of the unexpected gifts the school bestows on some of its pupils is populism. “All the world over,” declared William Gladstone – known as “the People’s William”, despite early 19th-century Eton and Oxford and his great wealth from trade and land – “I shall back the masses against the classes.” His fellow Etonian, Lord Randolph Churchill, invented “Tory democracy”, despite being the son of a duke. Today, the most popular Tory speakers are Boris and another Etonian, Jacob Reesmogg. I once saw Mr Rees-mogg on television facing the accusation that his poshness made him disdain the people. “Oh no,” he replied, quick as a flash, “vox populi, vox dei.” (Google it if your Latin is rusty.)
A related factor that may assist Etonians in the Darwinian fight for survival is the quite stupefying boredom of so much of our current public culture. In a world in which Mrs May, Philip Hammond, Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell have formal dominance of the public space, who would not crave something funnier, more human, more raffish?
Don’t forget that three of the most famous Etonians – Bertie Wooster, Captain Hook and James Bond – are enjoyable characters in fiction. So, in a way, is Boris.