Disastrous in every other respect, the recent revival of Etonian premierships did have a solitary benefit: a related succession of damning memoirs and studies of and by Etonians. When combined with the staggering failures of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, they conveyed one overwhelming message: the threat from this school is enough to justify some targeted form of vetting. It was ignored, of course, and the result is Kwasi Kwarteng.
If additional checks seem extreme, it has become clear that a general and well-founded suspicion of Eton, the academy also known as charity 1139086, offers the public little protection from its faultier products, partly because it considers them the flower of its system. The risk is exacerbated by another Etonian practice to which Tories, in particular, have proved fatally susceptible. Here’s Johnson fan Andrew Gimson on his other hero’s Boris-rivalling charm: “Kwarteng has a gusto and readiness to be amused which are not always found in senior politicians.” Many of us witnessed this readiness at the Queen’s funeral, where he seemed to be laughing his head off. And if you didn’t know, or didn’t care, that the cheerful Kwarteng also considered (see Britannia Unchained), many fellow citizens to be “among the worst idlers in the world”, all this laughter is possibly quite disarming. His fellow Etonian, the critic James Wood, has recalled the headmaster’s advice for leavers: “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.”
In Kwarteng’s case there have been, partially obscured by the charm, abundant signs that non-Etonian codes of conduct were not something he would value. Once an MP and promoted, he disparaged both judges and the parliamentary commissioner on standards, Kathryn Stone. After her suspension of Owen Paterson was (temporarily) blocked, he said it was “difficult” to see a future for her.
And this is a guess, but most Old Etonians are surely content to recreate their schooldays within one private men’s club. Shortly before he wrecked the economy, Kwarteng reportedly added membership of the Garrick to that of White’s: that’s around 1,600 men who presumably find him enchanting.
All the more reason, in a world that rewards their self-regard, for checks that would minimise the chances of another potentially lethal credit to the college. As with all such screening, it would offend some of the nice, harmless, actively gifted and/or whistleblowing Etonians who would also have to be questioned before acquiring significant influence in public life. Without the Etonian Rory Stewart, we would have lost some of the finest character assassination to which Johnson was ever subjected. Without the testimony of Etonians like Wood or Musa Okwanga, we might still not comprehend how one school could cause such havoc.
But perfectly innocent recruits to, say, the police or Foreign Office must submit to intrusive vetting, often for jobs offering comparatively limited opportunities for national immiseration. The process itself need not take long, with yes/no questions enough to identify individuals whose sense of brilliant and virile exceptionalism poses a particular risk. Recent political history indicates special carefulness around former Eton prefects and legendary captains of school, around the stars of its famous debates and anyone who says they absolutely loved the place. “I loved the place,” Cameron wrote. “I made friends.” One day he’d be able to give at least one of them, Lord Llewellyn of Steep, a peerage, and later the Paris ambassadorship.
What the recent long reads and memoirs suggest is that Eton’s specific type of entitlement, acting on a certain type of boy, is capable of producing deadly prodigies of conceit, ambition and sometimes skilfully hidden callousness. The evidence of Johnson and Cameron is that such people cannot be made safe. On the contrary, as if to advertise their immunity from conventional standards, they are apt to promote fellow graduates of what John le Carré (who taught there) described as a “deliberately brutalising process [that] integrated you with imperial ambitions and then let you loose into the world with a sense of elitism – but with your heart frozen”.
Even the better-thawed output, when they accept their former classmates’ sinecures, have clearly been sufficiently shaped by the school to feel unembarrassed by this accelerated method of advancing its motto (floreat etona: notable for revering the institution, not an ideal). “I look at the most confident people in my year,” Okwanga says, “and I realise that the greatest gift that has been bestowed upon them is that of shamelessness.”
How well it still works. The advancement of Etonians by Etonians, as if to compensate for the lost years of grammar school premiers, became so normalised after 2010 that it was never addressed as an actual scandal – as it might have been had the fraternity been exposed as freemasons, or ex-miners, or members of the same betting syndicate. Cameron put so many Etonians in his cabinet that even Michael Gove described it as “preposterous”: “I don’t know where you can find some such similar situation in a developed economy.”
One of Johnson’s final floreat-compliant acts – well, until we see his honours list – was to replace an unwanted party-planning PPS with a fresh Etonian, though that could be considered diverse compared with the continuing affront that is Jacob Rees-Mogg. The amateur historian was recently to be heard comparing fracking opponents to 19th-century machine breakers: “Sheer ludditery.” But maybe there is one thing we could learn from Rees-Mogg’s consistent reluctance, with his moralist’s hat on, to squander public money on charity. On, for instance, feeding people: “I don’t think the state can do everything.”
Amid the devastation achieved by a series of OEs, another obvious economy, one with the rare virtue of being wildly popular, would be to relieve the school that created them all of its charitable status.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
