To understand the Zahawi story and Tory sleaze,
look no further than Britain’s posh cliques
John Harris
From the disgraced former party chair to the Richard
Sharp investigation, government failure stems from a network of private schools
and elite universities
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Illustration
by Matt Kenyon
Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian
Sun 29 Jan
2023 08.33 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/29/elitist-leadership-zahawi-schools-britain
A country
in deep crisis ought to at least have a government capable of governing; it is
post-Brexit Britain’s unlucky fate to be run by an administration in a similar
state of breakdown. The Tory party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, has been found to have
committed a serious breach of the ministerial code and finally sacked. The
investigation into bullying accusations against Dominic Raab, the deputy prime
minister, is yet to conclude. Meanwhile, the latest story centred on Boris
Johnson grinds on.
If it was a
play, it would sit awkwardly between thriller and farce, with characters that
were well drawn, and well connected. Johnson, we know: the financially
incontinent prime minister who desperately needed an £800,000 “credit
facility”. Then there is Sam Blyth, a “distant cousin” of Johnson and founder
of a chain of Canadian private schools, apparently persuaded to be the then
prime minister’s loan guarantor. The cast is completed by Richard Sharp, the
former banker and Tory donor who is now the chair of the BBC, and Simon Case,
Britain’s most senior civil servant. Questions now swirl around Sharp’s alleged
dealings with the other three, in the weeks and months before he was appointed
to his role at the BBC. Last Monday, Johnson said that Sharp “knows absolutely
nothing about my personal finances – I can tell you that for ding-dang sure”.
Over the weekend, the Sunday Times published a leaked letter reportedly handed
to Johnson by Case: “Given the imminent announcement of Richard Sharp as the
new BBC chair,” it said, “it is important that you no longer ask his advice
about your personal financial matters.” We now await enlightenment about how
both these things could possibly be true.
By way of
shining a bit more light on this particular story, consider the backgrounds of
the actors in it. Johnson, of course, was educated at Eton College and Oxford
University. Sharp, whose father was the chairman of Cable & Wireless plc
and became Baron Sharp of Grimsdyke, was a sixth former at the private Merchant
Taylors’ school in north-west London, and also went to Oxford; his twin sister
is the president of the King’s Bench Division of the high court. Sunak – who
worked for Sharp at the investment bank Goldman Sachs – is another Oxford
alumnus, and an old boy of Winchester College; Case went to the independent
Bristol Grammar School, and Trinity College, Cambridge.
And so it
goes on. Sharp’s appointment as BBC chair is being reviewed by the commissioner
for public appointments, William Shawcross – another Old Etonian and Oxford
graduate, whose daughter Eleanor (St Paul’s School for Girls, then Oxford) is
Sunak’s policy chief. On the Sunday that the story first broke, Johnson and
Sharp were defended on BBC One by Johnson’s sister Rachel Johnson, another
former pupil of St Paul’s who went on to Oxford.
Meanwhile,
questions about dealings between HMRC and Nadhim Zahawi – a comparatively lowly
graduate of University College London, although he also spent time at private
schools and is very wealthy – were being investigated by the government’s
ethics adviser, Laurie Magnus, a former financier and “3rd baronet”, who is –
guess what? – an alumnus of both Oxford and Eton.
To some
extent, I have seen how these absurdly narrow cliques cohere, and why Britain –
or rather England – still looks more like a weird fortified city-state than a
forward-looking country. In 1989, I went to Oxford, having made it there from a
comprehensive school and a state-sector sixth-form college. Then, as now, it
was an institution that supposedly recruited and schooled the ruling class, but
I quickly got the impression that the latest elite generation had already come
into being, long before the relevant people had entered higher education.
Somewhere
outside my social circles were people who had arrived at Oxford secure in the
knowledge that they would be both comfortable in such grand surroundings and in
touch with lots of people they already counted as friends (like a lot of
state-educated students, I arrived there knowing no one at all). In a book
titled The Oxford Myth, put together in 1988 by Rachel Johnson, Boris Johnson
described “a loosely knit [sic] confederation of middle-class undergraduates,
invariably public school, who share the same accents and snobberies, and who
meet each other at the same parties”. He went on: “If you are a member of the establishment,
you will know it. You cannot be recruited.” I saw this in glimpses: Jacob
Rees-Mogg walking down Oxford High Street, dressed in his customary
double-breasted suit; his fellow high-ups at the famous Oxford Union Society,
who seemed old before their time, superficial and impossibly confident.
Last year
saw the publication of the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper’s superb book
Chums, which was about two connected stories: the hatching of the idea of
Brexit at Oxford, and the tale of how the Conservative party eventually ended
the unbroken run of state-educated leaders that had gone from Ted Heath to
Michael Howard. “In the 1980s,” Kuper wrote, “the upper classes were regaining
the confidence that had been beaten out of them during Britain’s social
democratic 1945-to-1979 era.”
For all
Margaret Thatcher’s patina of petit-bourgeois meritocracy, he said, “during her
reign, privilege and the right accent became something to be celebrated again”.
You see this vividly in the infamous Bullingdon Club photograph featuring
Johnson and David Cameron, taken at Oxford in 1987; two decades later, when
Cameron became Tory leader, the renaissance of poshness and entitlement was
complete. Kuper describes Cameron as “a quasi aristocrat who ruled the UK with a
posh clique of school chums”, a way of doing things at least partly adopted by
his latest successor: Sunak’s new “political secretary” is the former Times and
Spectator writer James Forsyth, a schoolfriend from Winchester.
There have
been two recurring themes in recent political history. Johnson crystallised a
sense of rich and powerful people acting with assumed impunity; Sunak, the weak
prefect, seems so accustomed to such behaviour that he can’t figure out how to
stop it. But this story blurs into something even bigger: a chain of people
safely bound into absurd networks of privilege have taken endlessly stupid
decisions, knowing that their wealth and connections mean they will never have
to worry about the consequences. This is the essential story of how we were led
out of the European Union by such privately educated chancers as Johnson, Rees-Mogg,
Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings and the former Tory MEP Daniel Hannan. It also
applies to the years of austerity instigated by Cameron, George Osborne and
Nick Clegg.
The context
for these tragedies remains as brazen and appalling as ever: at the last count,
two-thirds of senior judges were privately educated, along with 51% of what the
Sutton Trust charity calls “leading journalists”, and 52% of foreign office
diplomats. The figure for Sunak’s cabinet is 65%.
We may
break the conveyor belt that leads from private schools to the commanding
heights of power with a simple change: ensuring that the intake of Oxford,
Cambridge and all Russell Group universities reflects the proportion of people
in the UK who are state educated (93%). I also wonder if it would be an idea to
do what Kuper suggests, and turn Oxford and Cambridge into postgraduate
institutions, ending “elite” undergraduate education altogether.
But
obviously, there is so much more to do: put crudely, a huge process of reform
and positive discrimination that would finally open up our institutions, and
belatedly begin their transformation. Even as Britain tumbles, this
conversation has barely begun. It ought to start with a blunt acknowledgment:
that there is no way out of this country’s morass of failure and sleaze until
all those circles of power and entitlement are finally pushed aside.
John Harris
is a Guardian columnist
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