Caymans Post

A world within. A state apart.
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned the country into their playground

Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned the country into their playground

The reckless disdain of Boris Johnson and David Cameron is evidence of the institutional elitism blighting our politics

Over the past fortnight, the news from Westminster has rather resembled a weird play about pre-revolutionary France, or Tsarist Russia circa 1916.

In some parts of the country, the rate of unemployment runs at 15%. Six million people are now reckoned to be on universal credit. I was in Birmingham this week, where I heard lots of talk about the impossibility of finding work, and local businesses hanging on by their fingernails. But every time I switched on the radio, I heard a twisted soap opera about money, taste (or the lack of it) and a prime minister who is reportedly having difficulty getting by on £150,000 a year. Boris Johnson’s alleged insistence that he was minded to “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” rather than impose another lockdown suggests a Bourbon or Romanov driven to exasperation by the necessity of difficult choices. There is something similarly monarchical about the swift binning of the £2.6m Downing Street briefing room – further proof, it seems, that austerity need only worry the plebs.

As with David Cameron’s lobbying efforts on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill in apparent pursuit of a multimillion-pound payday, this is essentially a story about privilege, and the shamelessness and insensitivities that come with it. More specifically, it centres on the renaissance of an archetype that has been nothing but trouble: the ambitious, dizzyingly confident public schoolboy, convinced of his destiny but devoid of any coherent purpose – and, once gifted with power, always on the brink of letting loose chaos and mishap.

Boris Johnson at Eton in 1979.


I have recently been reading One Of Them, the memoir of an Etonian education written by Musa Okwonga, a black British writer whose recollections of his time at school are full of sharp and seemingly unarguable observations. As well as exploring how matters of privilege intersect with those of race, he eloquently nails how time spent at Eton serves to harden the kind of attitudes and attributes that, as alumni of the same school, Cameron and Johnson both embody.

Eton has long provided potent lessons in elitism and how it works. Okwonga recalls prefects not being appointed by staff or elected by boys from their own year, but “chosen by the prefects in the year above. The result is that if a boy wishes to be socially prominent at school, there are only 20 people in the school whose approval he truly needs.” If most of Eton’s pupils are thereby deemed irrelevant, it is not hard to infer what this means for its most successful pupils’ view of the people beyond the school’s walls: Okwonga remembers them being nicknamed “lebs”. The real world seems to be all but superfluous: boarding schools, after all, are designed to operate in isolation from it.

Nonchalance, meanwhile, is carefully cultivated: “Visible effort is mocked at my school – the trick is to achieve without seeming to try.” And for Eton’s high-flyers, there is an additional secret of success that Okwonga boils down to a simple aphorism: “if they merely gain prestige, then personal popularity will follow.” As Johnson’s lonely rise to the top seems to prove, the trick is not to be clubbable, but to achieve power and influence as a means of then acquiring friends and admirers. And as you do so, rules and conventions – along with consistency – can be casually pushed aside. “Shamelessness is the superpower of a certain section of the English upper classes,” Okwonga writes. “They don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, but this is where they perfect it.”

In Cameron’s case, the mindset he imbibed at school was evident in his cruel pursuit of austerity for political ends and blithe promises that were quickly forgotten. He pledged “no more tiresome, meddlesome, top-down restructures” of the NHS and quickly launched one of his own; having styled himself as an environmentalist, he reportedly then told his aides to “get rid of all the green crap”. Even more mind-boggling is the speech he made in early 2010 about corporate lobbying: “We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way … So we must be the party that sorts all this out.”

When he wasn’t “chillaxing”, Cameron tried to cover his lack of substance with a performative gravitas that sometimes verged on camp. Johnson, by contrast, seizes every opportunity to reduce politics to the absurd, and thereby makes the vacuum beneath him even more glaring. Without convictions or consistency you get a government based on serial lurching, from U-turn to U-turn and crisis to crisis, which sooner or later has massive consequences. Brexit, let us not forget, is a direct result of the latter-day dominance of politics by the privately educated.

Moroever, because that dominance symbolises a very English mixture of nostalgia, deference and recklessness, it is part of the reason why the UK is now pulling apart; indeed, the fact that Johnson has been so hare-brained about arrangements in Northern Ireland is a vivid case study in the perils of entrusting matters of the utmost fragility to people whose basic unseriousness is not just toxic, but extremely dangerous.

Part of the English disease is our readiness to ascribe our national disasters to questions of personal character. But the vanities of posh men and their habit of dragging us into catastrophe have much deeper roots. They centre on an ancient system that trains a narrow caste of people to run our affairs, but also ensures they have almost none of the attributes actually required. If this country is to belatedly move into the 21st century, this is what we will finally have to confront: a great tower of failings that, to use a very topical word, are truly institutional.

Newsletter

Related Articles

Caymans Post
0:00
0:00
Close
Paper straws found to contain long-lasting and potentially toxic chemicals - study
FTX's Bankman-Fried headed for jail after judge revokes bail
Blackrock gets half a trillion dollar deal to rebuild Ukraine
Israel: Unprecedented Civil Disobedience Looms as IDF Reservists Protest Judiciary Reform
America's First New Nuclear Reactor in Nearly Seven Years Begins Operations
Southeast Asia moves closer to economic unity with new regional payments system
Today Hunter Biden’s best friend and business associate, Devon Archer, testified that Joe Biden met in Georgetown with Russian Moscow Mayor's Wife Yelena Baturina who later paid Hunter Biden $3.5 million in so called “consulting fees”
Singapore Carries Out First Execution of a Woman in Two Decades Amid Capital Punishment Debate
Google testing journalism AI. We are doing it already 2 years, and without Google biased propoganda and manipulated censorship
Unlike illegal imigrants coming by boats - US Citizens Will Need Visa To Travel To Europe in 2024
Musk announces Twitter name and logo change to X.com
The politician and the journalist lost control and started fighting on live broadcast.
The future of sports
Unveiling the Black Hole: The Mysterious Fate of EU's Aid to Ukraine
Farewell to a Music Titan: Tony Bennett, Renowned Jazz and Pop Vocalist, Passes Away at 96
Alarming Behavior Among Florida's Sharks Raises Concerns Over Possible Cocaine Exposure
Transgender Exclusion in Miss Italy Stirs Controversy Amidst Changing Global Beauty Pageant Landscape
Joe Biden admitted, in his own words, that he delivered what he promised in exchange for the $10 million bribe he received from the Ukraine Oil Company.
TikTok Takes On Spotify And Apple, Launches Own Music Service
Global Trend: Using Anti-Fake News Laws as Censorship Tools - A Deep Dive into Tunisia's Scenario
Arresting Putin During South African Visit Would Equate to War Declaration, Asserts President Ramaphosa
Hacktivist Collective Anonymous Launches 'Project Disclosure' to Unearth Information on UFOs and ETIs
Typo sends millions of US military emails to Russian ally Mali
Server Arrested For Theft After Refusing To Pay A Table's $100 Restaurant Bill When They Dined & Dashed
The Changing Face of Europe: How Mass Migration is Reshaping the Political Landscape
China Urges EU to Clarify Strategic Partnership Amid Trade Tensions
Europe is boiling: Extreme Weather Conditions Prevail Across the Continent
The Last Pour: Anchor Brewing, America's Pioneer Craft Brewer, Closes After 127 Years
Democracy not: EU's Digital Commissioner Considers Shutting Down Social Media Platforms Amid Social Unrest
Sarah Silverman and Renowned Authors Lodge Copyright Infringement Case Against OpenAI and Meta
Italian Court's Controversial Ruling on Sexual Harassment Ignites Uproar
Why Do Tech Executives Support Kennedy Jr.?
The New York Times Announces Closure of its Sports Section in Favor of The Athletic
BBC Anchor Huw Edwards Hospitalized Amid Child Sex Abuse Allegations, Family Confirms
Florida Attorney General requests Meta CEO's testimony on company's platforms' alleged facilitation of illicit activities
The Distorted Mirror of actual approval ratings: Examining the True Threat to Democracy Beyond the Persona of Putin
40,000 child slaves in Congo are forced to work in cobalt mines so we can drive electric cars.
BBC Personalities Rebuke Accusations Amidst Scandal Involving Teen Exploitation
A Swift Disappointment: Why Is Taylor Swift Bypassing Canada on Her Global Tour?
Historic Moment: Edgars Rinkevics, EU's First Openly Gay Head of State, Takes Office as Latvia's President
Bye bye democracy, human rights, freedom: French Cops Can Now Secretly Activate Phone Cameras, Microphones And GPS To Spy On Citizens
The Poor Man With Money, Mark Zuckerberg, Unveils Twitter Replica with Heavy-Handed Censorship: A New Low in Innovation?
Unilever Plummets in a $2.5 Billion Free Fall, to begin with: A Reckoning for Misuse of Corporate Power Against National Interest
Beyond the Blame Game: The Need for Nuanced Perspectives on America's Complex Reality
Twitter Targets Meta: A Tangle of Trade Secrets and Copycat Culture
The Double-Edged Sword of AI: AI is linked to layoffs in industry that created it
US Sanctions on China's Chip Industry Backfire, Prompting Self-Inflicted Blowback
Meta Copy Twitter with New App, Threads
The New French Revolution
BlackRock Bitcoin ETF Application Refiled, Naming Coinbase as ‘Surveillance-Sharing’ Partner
×