Is Eton to blame for Brexit? By an Old Etonian
In today’s Guardian, John Harris wrote a piece about Eton College, the old pile of bricks just off the M4 next to Windsor that’s turned out all those prime ministers. It’s a school that embodies privilege, elitism, wealth, money and power, and has found itself enmeshed in the catastrophe of Brexit. The referendum was, after all, called by David Cameron OE. The Leave campaign was fronted by Boris Johnson OE. The European Research Group is chaired by the icily cadaverous Jacob Rees-Mogg OE. “The most telling element of his background,” Harris wrote of Mogg, “is surely the school that saw to the key five years of his education – Eton College. This institution sits at the heart of the Brexit mess and the dismal political failings that led to it.”
There can be no question that Brexit is covered with grubby Old Etonian paw prints. But can a school really exert so much influence over British public life? By which I mean, did the institution itself create the Sloane dilettantes who’ve accidentally ruined Britain? Is there something about the place, the playing fields, or perhaps even something in the water, that turns otherwise harmless poshos into rapacious power-hungry maniacs? Or are they born that way and the school merely an incidental waystation? It’s a question of great significance for the country. And also for me. Because I went there.
Or to be more precise, I was sent there. It is a very unusual place, not especially like a school at all. For one thing, no one tells you where you need to go for lessons. You have to work all that out. Not one tells you to get up, or to go to chapel, or what “kind” of Sunday it is, what team you’re playing in, where the playing fields are, or any of the rest of it. The whole thing is a vast rather efficiently organised and utterly baffling system that doesn’t give two hoots about you, where you came from or any of the rest of it. Your job, as a thirteen-year-old, is to navigate it all, while learning how to fix a starched collar to a shirt using two studs, one front, the other back, to learn who is in charge, what the different types of waistcoat mean, to absorb and use a huge downpour of slang, to learn your place within the institution and to be on time. Always on time. Being late is the great Etonian sin.
Most significantly of all, the school subjects you to a process of complete social adjustment. An anecdote should suffice. Bumping into an acquaintance in my first week, we compared notes. “Oh, well my head of house if in Sixth Form Select,” I told him, that being the group of prefects elevated for their academic merit. “Well my head of house is a god,” he countered. This turned out to be literally the case. His head of house was the crowned prince of a country in which he was regarded as a deity. Sadly, years later he was killed in a palace coup. As I said, Eton forces a certain social readjustment.
He was the only actual god at Eton at the time. There were a few other foreign monarchs and a load of British aristos, most of them perfectly nice. (In general, it turns out that very posh people are actually rather pleasant as they are the ones with nothing to prove. The real snobs are the ones a few rungs down.) But the thing you couldn’t get away from was the money. There was shitloads of it. I was at Eton during the 1980s and the Thatcherite City-boy deluge was in full swing. The place was awash with the children of the Square Mile and they brought with them a very particular type of materialism. I remember, when things went bad in the early 90s, one boy boasting about a party his parents had held. They’d called it their “Sod the Recession” party.
But for all this anecdotage, what really is the effect on the kids who go there? It teaches them self-reliance, for one thing. You are plunged into a university-type environment at thirteen, which snaps you from your early-teen stupor. If you can’t hack it, you are chucked out, and a lot of boys were thrown out in my time. It also teaches you the value of superficial charm. Nothing but nothing diffuses the attentions of the house bully like a well-timed gag or two. It also teaches you extreme social sensitivity, that is, the ability to locate the social centre and to court it mercilessly.
But most of all, it teaches you that you were born to rule. It’s what Eton existed for. Its very essence is to turn out a production line of decent young chaps with all the right instincts. The sort who can run a province in India, who know how to behave when they visit palaces and who can charm a crowd of locals at the drinks reception afterwards. Remember that perhaps the most important OE of the 20th Century, George Orwell, went out to Burma as an Imperial policeman.
But, I hear you say, we don’t have an empire any more. It’s all gone. Oh how wrong you are. We certainly do have an empire, a very British network that has spread across the globe, one that’s staffed by respectable public school boys, among them Old Etonians, who shuttle hither and thither with their mixture of self-confidence and charm, to further their interests and those of the mother country. That Empire is of course the City.
Huge numbers of my contemporaries went into the City. It makes sense, when you think about it. The independent, globe-trotting imperial spirit drummed into generations of public schoolboys is a very neat fit with the world of high finance. It demands the same skills, the same subtly-balanced deployment of warmth and reticence, the same ease in all social situations, the same willingness to become the centre of attention. The skills honed for use in the Raj have been smoothly repurposed for the boardroom.
Consider also that persistent myth of the global trading Britain, the Brexiteer vision of Britannia ruling the waves of international business. What is that if not the high financier’s worldview, the outlook of a man in a Mayfair townhouse, nobly surveying the boundless oceans of the world’s markets from the deck of his Bloomberg Terminal?
This really is where Brexit and the public school boys meet. Not in Common Lane, but in the city. Brexit is a creation of those city public schoolboys. Take Stuart Wheeler, for example. He went to Eton and made a pile with his financial spread betting firm. He used the money to fund UKIP, which we all know was rather craftily led by that other public schoolboy, Nigel Farage, formerly of Dulwich College. Nigel made his money in the City as a metals trader. One of Nigel’s biggest coups was in luring a pair of Tory MPs over to UKIP, the most high-profile of which was Douglas Carswell. He went to Charterhouse before going to work for a fund manager. And when Stuart Wheeler’s money ran a little dry, Aaron Banks stepped in. No public school boy, Banks was nevertheless an insurance magnate. Crispin Odey, the Harrow-educated hedge fund manager, gave the leave campaign £900,000. In July 2007, you might have read in the FT an interesting little report which revealed that “A new fund management boutique run by prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate Jacob Rees-Mogg and Ed Robertson has quietly started operating under the wing of Odey Asset Management.” Empire builders of the world unite.
John Harris is right in many things he says about my old school, especially when he points out the damage it can do to children not suited to the experience. There were a lot of those. Even posh kids can be ruined by the bottle, or drugs, and end up in jail. But when it comes to our current national Brexit disaster, I’m not so sure you can lay the blame at the gates of School Yard. If we were to magic Eton out of existence, those same boorish poshos would still infest SW1 to W14 and postcodes in between. Chances are they’d simply find themselves another school to call home. The same instincts that drove Brexit would still be there.
But the same can’t be said of the City. The unspoken and I think insufficiently-examined truth is that, without the high-financiers, Brexit would never have happened. For every Sloane vowel you hear delivered in support of Brexit, chances are there’s a hedge fund manager not far behind. I’m no fan of the public school system and as for my time at Eton, I hated the bloody place. But the greater blame for our current crisis lies elsewhere.
