How did Boris climb the greasy pole? By acquiring useless knowledge

Amol Rajan has done us all a favour. In his documentary “How to Break into the Elite”, the BBC’s media editor shone an unforgiving light on how the British education and class systems still conspire to reinforce and perpetuate blatant unfairness. Who your parents are, how you speak and where you went to school still seem to matter more than how much you have achieved — even in 2019.

An upper middle class person with a mediocre 2:2 degree is still more likely to bag a lucrative job in the City than a working class one with a First from a Russell Group university. And it was painful to watch the bright and impressive children of poor yet ambitious parents fall foul of “social codes”, “studied informality” and “polish”, while their posh contemporaries sailed through interviews and internships on a tide of “reassuringly expensive” networks and privilege.

Such injustice has little to do with politics. Bastions of the liberal elite, such as Channel Four and the BBC itself, are just as likely to discriminate against “ordinary” people as hedge funds or investment banks. One can pull oneself up by the bootstraps, only to find oneself booted out of a club of whose existence one was unaware, with unwritten rules make a mockery of meritocracy.

Only a few are streetwise enough to beat the system. Rajan himself, from a family of Indian immigrants living in South London, got into Cambridge and became Britain’s first non-white national newspaper editor. He got his break when he seized a chance to interview Tony Blair and stumped him with a question about a government report into faith schools that the then Prime Minister evidently hadn’t read. That earned him a reporting job and he never looked back.

For all his success, Rajan knows that there are always greater heights to scale: his father now hopes that his son will end up with a Nobel prize. “How do you expect me to do that, Dad?” For the social mountaineer, there is no guarantee that, even if he reaches the summit, there will be room at the top.

At one point, we saw Rajan driving through Islington, where he now lives, and pointing out with an ironical chuckle the street where Boris Johnson used to live. The Prime Minister’s path to success was similar to Rajan’s — Oxbridge followed by journalism — only it must have been incomparably easier for a King’s Scholar at Eton to elbow his way there.

At Oxford Boris prioritised becoming President of the Union, even at the cost of missing a First. He knew it wouldn’t matter. Being able to pulverise opponents in debate while still reducing audiences to helpless laughter, on the other hand, is a skill that he still uses almost daily. Thinking on your feet matters more to politicians than thinking things through.

Rajan isn’t afraid of the Johnsons, perhaps because, like them, he is comfortable in his own skin. Nor is he envious. A class act is classy, even if it owes everything to class.

That feeling is reciprocated. It is striking that the new Cabinet includes an unprecedented proportion of ethnic minority ministers. Boris boasts about his love of buses, but he also made the son of a Muslim bus driver Chancellor of the Exchequer and the daughter of a Ugandan Asian newsagent Home Secretary.

Since he entered Downing Street, a video of Boris at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival has gone viral. It shows him interrupting an interview to break into a recital of the Iliad in the original Greek. Whether this act is spontaneous or (more likely) rehearsed, his dramatic rendition immediately captivates the audience. They may not understand a single word, but they adore the performance. This is how you become Prime Minister in this country: master an ancient language that only a handful of schools teach, memorise a passage or two, unleash it unexpectedly and flatter people that they too belong to this exclusive elite.

Once upon a time bright boys from poor families also had ready access to such seemingly useless yet actually invaluable knowledge. Scholars at foundations such as Eton, Westminster and Winchester were poor. Oxford was filled, not with the children of bankers, but of butchers (such as the future Cardinal Wolsey). Grammar schools, church schools, free schools and the best academies still offer routes out of poverty. But it is rare for any educational institution to teach knowledge without a utilitarian purpose.

Yet this is the most precious kind of knowledge — as the likes of Boris Johnson know. He is not the first classicist to be Prime Minister. Gladstone wrote a book on Homer and Derby translated him. Asquith was a prize fellow of Balliol; Macmillan was equally gifted but his degree was interrupted by the Great War. Wilson, a grammar school boy, was at least as bright; so was Brown — though they were economists rather than classicists. Boris makes politics look easy. That is a skill that only comes from being nurtured in a culture that values knowledge, logic and beauty for their own sake.