An insider’s guide to the PM’s school
How did an Eton education shape the Boris Johnson of today? Here, the critic James Wood – one of the Prime Minister’s former classmates – lifts the lid on the experiences they shared inside its cosseted world
Even at a place like Eton, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in my year would actually become prime minister. At school, everyone is “ambitious”, everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things?
I remembered him as quite handsome, with the Etonian’s uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm. Mostly, he was defined by negatives: he wasn’t an intellectual or scholar, a rebel, a musician, a journalist or writer, even a sportsman. He wasn’t obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – “in finance”, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised masonically in the holidays, took one another’s sisters to parties in Gloucestershire and Sussex, and dressed like their fathers, in clothes that looked inherited even when just purchased from New & Lingwood.
My own background was different. In 1984, my last year at the school, I wrote an anti-Thatcher screed in the school magazine, and a tabloid journalist ambushed me in the street. Where did I live, what did my parents do? I saw his frustration when I told him that my father was a lecturer at Durham University, my mother a schoolteacher. “That doesn’t sound very establishment... You don’t have a relative in Maggie Thatcher’s cabinet?” We had no family connections, to Eton or anywhere else much. The only reason I was at the school was my mother’s madly aspirant zeal, her Scottish petit-bourgeois tirelessness. My older brother and I were both effectively scholarship boys. He was the real thing, a King’s Scholar (three years ahead of Boris Johnson); in my case, when my parents demonstrated financial need, the school eventually helped out with a bursary.
I was lucky – my religious parents would have insisted on “blessed” – and savoured that luck, grateful to be at such a school, though often keen to set fire to it. Of course, I wasn’t lucky – in the sense of being fortunate – like the born Etonian, and in time, once I had worked out the codes of this strange world, that difference would become not excruciating, but a source of strength. The born Etonian was at one with his heritage. The quickest way to ascertain a boy’s natural Etonianness was to find out if his father had gone there. Plenty had. Then I would start my plebeian social arithmetic. If his father went there, then 30 or so years earlier his grandparents had had the money to send his father there. So his grandfather was probably an old Etonian. Which meant that 60 or so years earlier his great-grandparents had had enough money… It was dizzying, climbing backwards along the branches of these golden family trees.
It was unimaginable to me, the quickly privileged descendant of schoolteachers and shopkeepers, that these Etonians had been privileged for so long that the precise origins of their fortune could no longer be located. What amazing security: to have always been well-off probably suggested that one would always be well-off. The future would look comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, Cameron is often described as “upper middle class”, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-greatgrandfather, and actually his great-great-great-grandfather, too... I think we can bump him out of the middle classes.
Getting the hang of this place entailed subterfuge, vigilance, mimicry – an adventure I often enjoyed. The accent obviously had to be improved, and any lingering Durham commonness rubbed out. My father would have to be promoted from senior lecturer to professor, and my mother’s job mystified out of existence. My parents’ shameful first names, Dennis and Sheila (furry dice hanging in a Ford Cortina), could obviously never be uttered. Thank God my brother was called Angus – a bit Scottish maybe, but weren’t there plenty of posh Scots? That my parents were teetotal Christians was also unutterable. I would need better clothes; how could I get cheap shoes that looked expensive?
“We were told to be wary of misusing our superiority, but we were not told we didn’t have it – its perpetuation was guaranteed”
This labour of inclusion, like some journey of immigration, was a matter of working out hints and barely visible laws, fitting in quietly without drawing attention to oneself. The task mainly involved studying networks. How did everything connect? Surely it did in some way? Certain London areas, certain prep schools, London shops (Harrods, for some reason, was considered a bit “common”, while Harvey Nichols was not), certain sports, clothes, even brands of aftershave: they all signified. There
were “distinguished” surnames everywhere, and one had to catch up with a celebrity that everyone else had already divined: Fiennes, Bingham (Lord Lucan’s son), Vestey, Wellesley, Sainsbury. There were copious numbers of double-barrelled names: FearnleyWhittingstall, Scrase-Dickins, the delicious Money-Coutts.
There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. “Christie” meant something to me, so I assumed he was related to the auctioneers. Glyndebourne meant nothing to me, but my parents explained what it was. So: these were “the Christies who owned Glyndebourne”, and perhaps only mildly related to the more famous Christies who auctioned things? Families had major and minor branches – and even the minor branches were major. Of course there were subgroups and cliques. The largest faultline, really, was intelligence. The boys whose fathers and grandfathers had been to Eton, who inherited the school like an old watch or a family farm, didn’t have to use their brains, even if they had them. Those who had arrived more precipitously at this grand place – via academic or music scholarships, pushy middle-class parents, raw social experiments of one kind or another – had to live on their wits. King’s Scholars, who had won their scholarships by competitive exam, were set apart, herded into their own house and sartorially marked off with short black gowns, giving their closed world the aspect of a curious social laboratory. I always felt a bit sorry for my brother when I caught sight of him running towards lessons, clutching his “KS” gown to his sides like a bird holding in its wings, a clever animal in an alien habitat.
By and large, these scholars were middle- or upper-middle-class, the children of academics, doctors, businessmen. If they were posh, they were interestingly so, like the brilliant mathematician and future Fields medallist Timothy Gowers, whose father was a composer and whose great-great-grandfather had been a famous neurologist. Or they came from bohemian and eccentric families, like Boris Johnson, perhaps with a hint of social arrivisme. Johnson, by the way, looked pretty much the same at 15 as he does at 55, and was a familiar sight as he charged his way around the college lanes. The bigfoot stoop (he was known as “the Yeti”), the bumbling confidence, the skimmed-milk pallor, the berserk hair, the alarming air of imminent self-harm, which gave the impression that he had been freshly released from some protective institution: all was already in place.
In 1984 I couldn’t have predicted that politics in the early 21st century would be so contaminated by my schoolfellows. Cameron became prime minister in 2010, and British life began to resemble a set-up from a Johnny English comedy – soon the prime minister, the mayor of London and the archbishop of Canterbury were all old Etonians. And there are so many involved in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to become under-secretary of state at the Department for Exiting the European Union. Even the ranks of decency are stocked by old Etonians: Oliver Letwin, Rory Stewart and Hugo Dixon, editor-in-chief of the useful anti-Brexit website InFacts. (I remember Dixon, a King’s Scholar: skinny, super-bright, otherworldly.)
Near the end of our time at school, we were addressed by the headmaster (this is my memory, but it may have been some other senior member of staff). It was, I guess, an informal version of a commencement address, a send-off with valedictory ethics. The headmaster, a thoughtful Scot, instructed us in how we should comport ourselves in the world. The Etonian, he said, is one who can go into any room, mingle with any social group, be at ease and put others at their ease. (Not a bad model for the aspirant politicians in the room.) The Etonian is marked by his air of “effortless superiority”. The phrase was already commonplace at the school, appealed to and sometimes mocked. The headmaster, as I recall, invoked it in a cautionary spirit. He meant: you have been told that this is your strength, but don’t let it become your weakness. “Effortless superiority” was the ethos, the ideal you aspired to: charmed confidence balanced by strategic noblesse oblige. If you aren’t forever performing your superiority but are elegantly obscuring it, you don’t alienate those many people who are suspicious of your privilege. We were told to be wary of misusing our superiority, but we were not told we didn’t have it. The instruction, even when well-intentioned, depended on this modification – and so its perpetuation was guaranteed.
These are the memories I’ve been revisiting while the Brexit madness has been escalating – a madness casually instituted, secretly engineered and noisily bolstered by a cabal of old Etonians born between 1962 and 1975, the year we joined the Common Market. “Effortless superiority”, and the generations of entitlement that bred this relaxed mantra, may go some way to explaining the peculiar lightness of being that characterised Cameron’s conduct throughout: the decision to hold the referendum, the unpressed rhythm of the referendum campaign, and then his apparently easy abandonment of political responsibility as he hummed his way off the podium after issuing his resignation. It may go more of the way towards explaining Johnson’s astonishing ethical irresponsibility around language. At the end of March, in the week we were supposed to leave the EU, Johnson was in public conversation with Charles Moore, the old Etonian former editor of The Daily Telegraph, and, well, you know how one old Etonian gets in the presence of another. “This was the Friday,” Johnson lamented, “when Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussex, half blind with scrumpy, singing Brexit shanties at the tops of their voices and beating the hedgerows with staves.”
“Boris Johnson looked much the same then as now: the bumbling confidence, the berserk hair,
the alarming air of imminent self-harm”
There are no fundamental political differences between Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg because they belong to the same world. A world of extreme wealth where there has never been any decline for them. They are secure, as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were before them. Once that security may have come from land; now it comes from hedge funds, shipping fortunes and extracurricular salaries (“chicken feed”, Johnson said of the £250,000 a year he was paid to write a column). Whatever happens in the next 30 or 40 years, postBrexit, isn’t going to affect them. Privilege is like an unwritten constitution: you can never lose what you never have to find.
James Wood is a writer for The New Yorker. A longer version of this article appeared in the London Review of Books; lrb.co.uk.