Sunak, last of the arrogant posh boys?
JOHN WYCLIFFE
‘THE classless society has arrived!’ So said Robert Harris in the Sunday Times on the election of John Major as Tory leader (and therefore Prime Minister) in 1990. Major had indeed risen from humble beginnings, but in fact his exceptionalism was somewhat overplayed: he was part of a long line of state-school-educated Prime Ministers stretching back to Harold Wilson in 1964, and including Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher.
Harris could not have been more wrong. We were already, thanks to Tony Crosland’s act of vandalism in destroying them, entering the twilight of the grammar school era that had seen Britain, so often characterised as a stuffy and class-bound society, acquire the greatest social mobility in Western Europe. Due to the failed comprehensive experiment and despite the free-market revolution of the 1980s, the privately educated were once again ascending to dominate the pinnacle of all aspects of British life, not least in politics.
Since Major, we have been led largely by a succession, in Nadine Dorries’s memorable phrase, of ‘arrogant posh boys’. Expensively educated at elite public (i.e. private) schools, they governed Britain for a total of 21 years out of the next 27: Blair (Fettes), Cameron (Eton), Johnson (Eton again) and Sunak (Winchester). Apart from the office of Prime Minister, other notables who achieved high office included Nick Clegg (Westminster) and George Osborne (St Paul’s).
There is nothing intrinsically wrong in being privately educated, of course, but this new elite were arguably quite different from the old gentry with their country estates and idea of noblesse oblige to those less fortunate. Often urban rather than country and liberal rather than conservative in their tastes, they were the products of a new private school culture that was both socially entitled and to a large extent meritocratic in nature. Traditionally many private schools had been little more than finishing schools for young gentlemen, but in the post-war years competition from the academically rigorous grammar schools had galvanised many of them into becoming far more intellectually meritocratic institutions.
Perhaps because of feeling they had got where they did on merit rather than as an accident of birth, this generation of leaders seemed to have little interest or care for the lives of others and governed almost entirely for the needs of people like themselves. All were relatively young, and few had done anything of note before entering politics. All had a hunger for personal advancement that always came before any kind of political conviction or commitment to public service. All, except the repellent Osborne and slightly awkward Sunak, had an easy, oily charm. Far more crucially, all were profoundly contemptuous of democracy and the electorate they were supposed to serve. This latter quality was marked by the fact that apart from Nick Clegg, every one of them – assuming that, as widely predicted, Rishi Sunak soon departs to California – gave up their seats in the House of Commons as soon as their time at the top was over. (This is in marked contrast to their state-school-educated counterparts Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Liz Truss, who at least showed their constituents the respect they deserved by seeing out their term on the back benches.) With their smug, arrogant demeanour, they seemed to regard politics as a game for people like them: manifesto promises were a means to an end and high office a mere stepping stone to membership of a globalist elite of highly lucrative sinecures and speaking tours. Which way Sunak will go we don’t yet know. His daughters are at school here and he has not yet resigned his seat.
Of the bunch, by far the most fascinating, terrifying and impactful was Tony Blair. Even today, despite all that has been written about him, he is still a somewhat enigmatic figure. Was he, as those such as the columnist Bruce Anderson maintain, merely a ‘rootless radical’, an essentially shallow opportunist obsessed with change for change’s sake, little more than a front man for more ideological and sinister figures within the New Labour movement? Or was Blair himself a convinced radical, even, as Peter Hitchens has hinted, a Trotskyite sleeper from his days at Oxford?
What is indisputable is that Blair was a malevolent political genius who facilitated huge changes to Britain’s constitutional settlement and accelerated the hollowing-out of its democracy; the dark shadow of his legacy we still live with today. Brilliantly, he saw that to cement his revolution he needed to convert the Tories to social liberalism and was astoundingly successful in doing so. Thus, he paved the way for the equally socially liberal David Cameron, under whom the ascendancy of the ‘arrogant posh boys’ (and gels) arguably reached its apogee. Cameron notoriously presided over a ‘chumocracy’ of chaps and chapesses like himself, sometimes known as the ‘Chipping Norton set’. Upon his resignation he showered a good many of them with honours of dubious merit – a practice repeated by his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson nine years later.
Rishi Sunak was the last of the breed. He lacked some of the easy charm of his predecessors but arguably sometimes behaved with a bit more genuine class, agreeing to stay for a few months as Opposition leader to help his party out. Still, his murky role in defenestrating the elected Boris Johnson and subsequently Liz Truss showed that he was hardly a poster boy for democratic accountability or integrity himself.
As Sunak departs for the West Coast, with the robotic Starmer ensconced as Prime Minister and Kemi Badenoch elected as Tory leader, it seems the time of the arrogant posh boys has come to an end – at least for now. None will be remembered for leaving the country better than they found it, but then none of them seemed to care about it all that much to begin with.
This article (Sunak, last of the arrogant posh boys?) was created and published by The Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author John Wycliffe
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