Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned
the country into their playground
John Harris
The reckless disdain of Boris Johnson and David
Cameron is evidence of the institutional elitism blighting our politics
Sun 2 May
2021 13.38 BST
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.
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.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário