But I wasn’t there to gossip, plot and gripe with my mates; I was on a mission. Would I be able to work out what the Prime Minister really thought about religion? I have long found this a puzzle, not knowing what to make of the multitude of signals that he gives out. Earlier this year he described himself as a “very, very bad Christian”. Asked by Robert Peston whether he was now a Roman Catholic, after his marriage in a Roman Catholic cathedral, he declined to answer. “I don’t discuss these deep issues,” he blustered. Then, spotting an opportunity to have a swipe at the openly atheist Keir Starmer, he added a quote from Psalm 14: “the foolish man has said in his heart there is no God.” Peston played along and simply chuckled.

There was lots of chuckling going on at No.10. Introduced by fellow Etonian, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Boris stood up and threw out some amusing anecdotes. He and Justin Welby go running together round Lambeth Palace gardens. Sometimes they run in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. It was a metaphor for the relationship between church and state. He then thanked the Church for its Covid response, which delivered on “the clear teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ to ‘be a good neighbour’”. Oh, I thought. Now there is a phrase: “our Lord Jesus Christ”. “Our” is such a strong word of belonging. The evangelicals smiled. It is an “I am one of you” word. Or maybe it was just something he said — something people say.

The problem I have with Boris is that all that Etonian bluster and bullshit is so wall-to-wall you never get the feeling you are seeing the real thing, whatever that is. I long for a flicker of sincerity — something Mrs May did in spades at her Christmas parties — some sense of what he really thinks about things. Yes, what he really believes. But there is a kind of dandyish public-school raconteur for whom the admission of sincerity is some sort of failure, a sign that the great game has broken down, a depressing admission that charm can only go so far. So everything is deflection and misdirection, smiling and ducking, making other people laugh as a strategy of tactical evasion. And as with Peston, it works. Our laughter gives him time to make for the exit. Only then do you feel just a little short-changed.

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Now this sort of dandyish bullshitter has to be very careful with religion. Because at some point religion demands precisely the kind of moral seriousness — sincerity of heart — that Boris despises, or is at a loss to know what to do with. Yes, I too avoid the man who will come up to me on Oxford Street, look me straight in the eye and ask me if I believe in Jesus. Everything inside me screams “none of your bloody business”. But this sort of evangelical directness has no time for the social conventions which we often hide behind, and which allow Boris Johnson to be the master of illusion.

But there is a story about Boris being put on the spot like this. And it is quite extraordinary.

Back in 2019, at the time of the September Equinox, a group of new-age religious pilgrims — Extinction Rebellion supporters — were walking the Ridgeway, part of an ancient trail from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia, a route well-known for its springs and holy places. Their plan was to travel barefoot and sing to the Great Spirit Mother as they went. They wanted their prayers to “open the hearts and minds of those in power”.

As they passed Chequers, the weekend retreat of the Prime Minister, they stopped off to visit a nearby farm shop. And — how extraordinary — there he was: Boris Johnson getting his groceries. Just Boris and the cashier in this tiny, enclosed space. And not knowing what to say, this group of women decided to stand around and just sing: “Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you.”

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Now I find what happened next really hard to square with what I know of the Prime Minister. The way Tori Lewis, one of the women, describes the scene, Boris Johnson was strangely moved by the experience. “His mouth is just open, he has his hand on his heart, he has tears in his eyes.” Of course, Boris had no idea how to react to this cringey intrusion into his personal space. “I, err, don’t know what…” he apparently blurted out.

Tori goes on: “Annabel intuitively — she’s a beautiful mother — puts her hand on his shoulder and sees him like a little boy that he is and we keep singing.” Regaining his composure, Boris asks the group where they are from, makes polite conversation, and looks for the exit. “We are healing the world one heart at a time” they sing as he leaves.

If this wasn’t strange enough, one of the group then overheard him talking to his then-girlfriend, Carrie, who was waiting outside: “Where have they come from, it’s like they have emerged from the Earth?” he asked. “Yes” she replied, “and they have a message for you.” And he said, “listen to your heart”.

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This, by the way, is the reason evangelical Christians used to get such good results in posh public schools. Here is a group of emotionally damaged children, who have suffered a kind of privileged abandonment, who have learnt to manage the absence of necessary motherly love — though this management is inevitably unstable and difficult to maintain. Suddenly, they are offered a kind of love — a “hand on the shoulder” — that is as emotionally direct and all-embracing as they might imagine motherly love to be. It is a religion of the heart, so to speak, for those whose hearts are a source of pain. Some retreat from this offer, appalled. Others embrace it with huge transformative joy, and it marks them for the rest of their lives. “Why do you need a God if you have a good mother?” my friend, the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, asked me the other day. It’s a very challenging question.

Justin Welby didn’t get converted at Eton. His conversion was at Cambridge, on the evening of 12 October 1975. There is often a single date, for evangelicals, because what happens is a kind of immediate breakthrough. A friend invited Welby to his rooms at Trinity College. Nearing midnight, Nicky Hills pressed Welby, “Jesus died on the cross for you, Justin”. At that moment, Welby says that the penny dropped and, as he later put it, “I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life”. Were Welby on Adam Phillips’ couch, this experience would no doubt be brought into some sort of conversation about his highly dysfunctional parents — both alcoholics, his father turning out not to have been his father after all.

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Boris had a dysfunctional home life, too. His mother and father divorced when he was 15. There are stories that his father was abusive towards her. But where Welby embraced the emotional hyper-sincerity of evangelical Christianity, Boris rejects it with every fibre of his being, terrified that it is the one thing that can bring down the “pyramid of piffle” on which the whole Boris act is founded.

In effect, Boris is a polytheist: he worships a great many gods. That’s what allows him to be all things to all people. Yes, he refers to “our Lord Jesus Christ” in front of the Christians, but he’d flirt in the same way with other gods too — as promiscuous with divinity as he is elsewhere in his life.

Boris has a lot in common with his schoolmate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can see why they got on. They have similar demons. But they react to them in totally opposite ways, running in different directions.

So our rebellion, to the extent that it wasn’t just about smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, tended to be about class and class guilt. Like Malcolm McDowell in the 1968 public school revolution fantasy film if…., we were on the Left. We spoke with mockney accents; one of my friends became a skinhead and slipped away to Stamford Bridge every other Saturday.

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Today’s elite public school radicalism is a very different animal. The schools no longer think of themselves as conservative institutions training a ruling class to preserve a national heritage — they are now academic forcing houses attracting and producing a global elite of the “brightest and best”. They think of themselves as academic meritocracies, albeit with a bias towards the affluent, and are often in the vanguard of the most fashionable pedagogical and social trends.

Contemporary race- and gender- based progressivism is therefore no threat at all to the people running the schools, indeed it is positively welcomed by them. One can observe this in the kerfuffle surrounding the Eton master who has been sacked for explaining, and at least partially defending, the concept of patriarchy — it was the Eton authorities who intervened, not an uprising of radical pupils, and some parents and pupils have actually been protesting against the sacking. But in my experience of speaking at London private day schools and knowing plenty of young people who have emerged from them in recent years, progressive groupthink is the norm.

I recently stumbled across an example of this in the alumni magazine of St Paul’s, another elite private school. It featured an interview with former pupil Jonah Freud, who has recently launched a petition to “Decolonise St Paul’s” that has been signed by more than 1,000 current and former students. The letter calls for “educating through a global, rather than eurocentric, curriculum” and “deconstructing the racist fabric of our society”. Jonah, who studied Race and Pop Music at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is the son of Matthew Freud, grandson of Clement, himself the grandson of Sigmund. Interviewer Tom Adeyoola writes of the moment Freud was awakened:

“For someone already ‘woke’ it was something closer to home that compelled him to action in writing to St Paul’s; the similarity between the names of George Floyd and his older brother George Freud. In his own words, ‘I have never experienced anything of the fear that George Floyd’s family would have feared and the only reason for that is that I am white.'”

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I don’t want to sound cynical about this; it is obviously a welcome development that young men and women, many of whom will graduate to important jobs in our society, have egalitarian instincts and are aware of their privileges. But what about the most important privilege of all: their parents’ wealth? It is rather morally convenient for them to believe passionately in every kind of equality except economic equality.

Perhaps at some unconscious level the elite progressive public school authorities and pupils feel they will get a free pass for their huge financial advantages, if only they shout loudly enough about how they are challenging all other kinds. And as the conformist young progressives agonise about their white privilege it is rather handy that this places them in the same boat as lower income white people in struggling post-industrial towns. If both groups are primarily privileged by their race, the heads of Eton and St Paul’s can with a clear conscience complain about anti-public school bias when Oxford and Cambridge colleges try to raise their quota of people from such low income backgrounds.

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What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May in 2017. It was a clumsily expressed sentiment. But isn’t this exactly what she was talking about? A financial and educational elite, including significant sections of big business, who are increasingly disconnected from the feelings and interests of the rest of the country yet regard themselves as leading the struggle for human progress.

Shaun Bailey, the Tory London mayoral candidate, talks about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national “team”. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support; but a worrying aspect of the BLM protests earlier in the year was how it divided the country, between a big section of the white elite — who embraced it enthusiastically — and the white provincial majority who seemed to be looking on with some scepticism.

Surely, if elite public schools do have any justification in a modern liberal democracy, it is precisely that the people who run them are teaching their privileged pupils to think clearly, honestly and independently about social (and other) problems, not egging them on to embrace the latest fashionable cause. As the greatest of 20th century Etonians, George Orwell, put it: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

On a T.A. course, over a decade ago, in the officer’s mess of Prince William of Gloucester Barracks in Grantham, a hungover colleague complained at breakfast of being woken during the night by a figure in RAF uniform. The mess staff, glancing at each other, alerted us to the story of the base’s purported ghost, an RAF airman killed in a wartime accident, whose presence, it transpired, was only ever experienced in my friend’s room.

That last tale is perhaps unsurprising: ghosts, should they exist, seem to be curiously institutionalised figures, adhering to schools, hospitals and museums, the London Underground and military installations. The Army, in particular, has a surprisingly rich and detailed ghost lore about its various historic barracks across Britain and, formerly, Germany. In this, we can say there’s something particularly British about ghosts: like our establishment, they seem doomed to wander forlornly across one Gothic quadrangle or another for eternity.

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The essential Britishness of the ghost is worthy of consideration: this country, and all its constituent nations, shares with Ireland an extremely rich and highly evolved corpus of ghostly tales and claimed sightings compared to our European neighbours. No wonder, then, that the writer Peter Ackroyd claimed, in The English Ghost, that “the English see more ghosts than anyone else.” And yet, while “the word is of Anglo-Saxon derivation… curiously enough, the Anglo-Saxons did not see ghosts.” Is our ghost tradition a distant memory, suspended in the nocturnal gloom, of our island’s Celtic past? Through it, is England still, in some ghostly fashion, a Celtic nation? After all, as Ackroyd notes, boggart — the traditional northern English term for ghostly apparitions — like  bogeyman, the Cornish Bucca and Shakespeare’s Puck all derive from the Brythonic word for ghost, bwg.

Perhaps it is more relevant to note, as Ackroyd does, that “the English are also in many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national television, and where every town and village has its own local historian.” The ghost, then, can perhaps be understood as the unconscious national understanding that the past is not dead, nor even truly past. We are haunted by our history, with a pleasing frisson, like no other nation on earth. Perhaps we can go further, and ask: are ghosts reactionaries? Suspended between past and present, retreading the forgotten ways of history, they are not simply residual echoes of the past, but exist purely in tension with modernity.

This tension between past and present, tradition and modernity can most clearly be seen in the tales of England’s greatest writer of ghost stories, M. R. James. The son of an East Anglian curate, his life’s path circumscribed, through his own choice, by the quadrangles of Eton, King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton again, Montague Rhodes James haunted the institutions of Edwardian England at a time of great and unbearable change. Like the fussy dons or stolid sons of the East Anglian squirearchy who peopled his tales, James was troubled by a dimly perceived force at the very edge of his vision which threatened to bring great horror to his world: modernity.

In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of James’s ghost stories, the professor of English literature Darryl Jones observes that James’s stories “give articulation to a particularly English longing for the past, perhaps unsurprising for a writer who understood himself to be a Victorian, sometimes at sea in, and often at odds with the modern world.” In his professional life, “across a long career as an increasingly influential academic and university administrator, James seems to have opposed, and attempted to block where he could, every piece of progressive legislation and every really modern thinker that crossed his path, increasingly seeing (and using) Eton and King’s as bulwarks against secular modernity.” And no wonder: “Modernity is terrifying, monstrous, demonic.”

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James himself was aware of this dynamic, observing that he preferred modern settings for his stories because “the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective… roughly speaking, the ghost should be a contemporary of the seer.” The ghost is not a ghost because it is old: what makes it ghostly, what grants it its power, is precisely that it haunts the present and its rationalist assumptions with deeper, older passions. The ghost is the past, which will not stay buried, whatever we may wish. Such a tension between past and present, and the fear of a hazily-seen, monstrous future, is not unique to James’ stories, but is a thread that runs throughout the genre. 

In The History of the British Ghost Story, the literary critic Simon Hay observed that “the ghost story is, unlike the historical novel, a failed modernity narrative.” He goes on to write:

“The modernity on display in the ghost story has not successfully distinguished itself from its past; indeed, the whole point of the ghost story is that the present cannot wrench free of the past and so has not become fully modern. The ghost story, in other words, holds to a model of history as traumatically rather than nostalgically available to us.” 

But there is nevertheless something uniquely English about James’s pained wrestling with these tensions. After all, the classic vampire story, the product of the Anglo-Irish writers Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, encapsulates the anxieties of the residents of the mouldering Big House living parasitically on a superstitious and unhappy peasantry.

Certainly, James’s works are deeply rooted in the landscapes of England. The most common setting of his stories is a small, lonely, neoclassical manor, in an eerily flat and windswept East Anglia. In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” (1903) James writes with wistful power of the Suffolk shoreline, with its “squat Martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden groins, the dim and murmuring sea.” These are the edgelands, the lonely Saxon shore, “the lands of invaders and colonizers, the Angles who drove out or intermarried with the previous inhabitants of the area,” notes the literary critic Derek Johnston, where “the connection to the local soil and landscape runs generations deep, but it has also been built upon the remains of earlier populations, with earlier connections to that landscape, overrun by the incomers.”

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By 1925’s “A Warning to the Curious”, the Suffolk landscape of “marshes intersected by dykes to the south,” with its “flat fields to the north, merging into the heath, fir woods, and above all, gorse, inland,” is haunted by more modern threats. The drama revolves around the buried crown of the Saxon king Raedwald of East Anglia (whose real-life ship burial, discovered in 1939, recurs in later fictional explorations of Englishness, from Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to the BBC’s Detectorists). The crown is hidden along this lonely shoreline to protect England from the outside world — one of three “buried in different places near the coast to keep off the Danes or the French or the Germans.” The excavation of this protective talisman summons up dark forces, turning the familiar landscape uncanny, the Heimlich into the Unheimlich:

“calm sea dead in front, faint barking of a dog at a cottage on a gleaming dyke between us and it: full moon making that path we know across the sea: the eternal whisper of the Scotch firs just above us, and the sea in front. Yet, in all this quest, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment.”

As Johnston notes, this is the “dark heritage” understanding of Britain’s landscape, a peculiarly “English tradition… of accepting the comfort in which one currently exists and pointing out that it is surrounded by potential horrors.” In James’ stories, “the rural landscape is not a reassuring indicator of permanence, nor a comforting example of man’s dominance over nature… but rather a symbol of the thin skin of civilisation that covers the deep and ancient horrors of the world.”

Similarly, in each story, as the literary critic Julia Briggs noted, “the hero is mildly culpable in that he wilfully rejects, because of his scepticism perhaps, the advice of wiser or older men.” As the bluff retired colonel “of prounouncedly Protestant views” in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” warns the central character, an unimaginative Professor of Ontography who literally unearths an ancient threat from the sandy Suffolk shoreline, “there’s generally something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for generations.” 

The cursed whistle, inscribed in Latin, dug up from the ruins of a Templar preceptory, is of course a relic of England’s buried Catholic past, as the colonel notes, warning the professor that “he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belonged to a set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be affirmed that you never knew what they might not have been up to.” Through the tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism that run through James’s work, from his earliest tale “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (1893) onward, a case can even be made for James as an Anglo-Catholic writer, whose rejection of modernity and desire to imbue the present with the sacred, awful mysteries of the past align him with those other critics of modernity in English early twentieth century genre writing, Chesterton and Tolkien. 

For the Catholic writer Daniel Frampton, James is “an especially poignant example of an English sensibility that regained, or perhaps even retained, a degree of Catholic feeling that was at its core medieval” and his ghost stories “are themselves a ghostly manifestation of the English, not always Catholic, sensibility that has come to realise that something vital really was lost as a consequence of the Reformation, and that this was to be regretted, since it also led to a process of secularisation.” 

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Is there a clearer metaphor, then, than James’s corpus of ghost stories for the conservative worldview? James’s attachment to the English landscape, his obsession with England’s very soil and the secrets buried within it, and his understanding that the deeper, non-rational passions of the past are more powerful than the bland assurances of modernity are the central currents that run through English conservatism. Writing at the height of literary modernism, James’s fixation with the past’s dark and seductive threat to break into the present can be read as a form of wish-fulfilment, a desire to see modernity and the forces it unleashed sent scurrying away in chastened terror.

Unfortunately for James’ equilibrium, modernity could not be kept at bay in the world outside his Cambridge study. As Mark Fisher observed, even the Lowestoft hotel James used as the setting for “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” was burned down by suffragettes in 1924. More profoundly, that great engine of modernity, the First World War, saw Cambridge converted into a finishing school for the trenches, and the King’s College playing fields into an overflow hospital for the Flanders wounded.

Perhaps the single most-read text of James’s entire writing career was the sober message of remembrance he penned, at the government’s request, to accompany the “death penny” memorial plaques sent to the war dead’s next of kin: 1,355,000 were sent to grieving families. Deeply affected by the deaths of so many of his students in the war, James retired as Provost of King’s College in 1918 to return to the Eton of his childhood, until his own death in 1936.

In the end, James could no more fend off the 20th century than could the static, unchanging England he loved. Perhaps it is only now that modernity is itself in crisis, challenged by the re-irruption of the passions of the past into the disordered present, that we can reassess James as an explicitly conservative writer, whose critique of progress, like the ghost tales which envelop it, is most powerful for only facing its horror obliquely.

This week, children across the country will be heading back to school; we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, our writers share some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.

I went to Eton. I am – here, he cringes in anticipation of a blow – an Old Etonian. Given the visibility of Old Etonians in our public life, and the widespread and understandable view that their influence has not been entirely for the good, I make this confession hesitantly when I make it at all.

Nobody wants to admit to “privilege” – but privileged we all, without any doubt, were. Had I not gone to Eton (I make, here, the disclaimer that I was a scholarship boy, in the hopes of claiming that I at least in part earned the privilege), I would not have had access to the cascade of educational wonderments I did enjoy.

You could not, not in a million years, claim plausibly that this was just another school – still less that it does not confer a vast and unfair advantage to its alumni, over the alumni of even the best schools in the state system. Yes, we all dressed like penguins and tourists pointed at us. But it was a small price to pay.

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By Sam Leith

Not so long ago I was chatting to an urbane young businessman at a London party: after a few minutes he raised his eyebrows and asked: “And… you went to school?” It took a second before I realised he wasn’t questioning whether I had had any formal education, but using the old code Etonians employ when referring to their College.

It is a masonic handshake, but so very much more exclusive. It is a nod to understood values along with a wry acknowledgement of the self-regarding uniqueness of the place. These codes, the jokes and their understanding are a small but not insignificant part of the package for which my parents, and my grandparents, and several generations before them, paid all that money.

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For a long time I told myself that a few years at Eton hadn’t meant very much to my life. After all, it was not a long stint – as I made clear to that smooth OE (old Etonian) and do to anyone else who brings it up – I was ejected after less than three years, at 16 (for smoking, drinking and suspected homosexual tendencies beyond the norm).

I was quite proud then that Eton’s quality control system had found me wanting; I was pretty sure I didn’t want any more of what the school offered and I was not unaware of the hallowed line of Eton rejects and rebels for whom life turned out interestingly. In the time of The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ being expelled from Eton was pretty cool.

But I realise now that I am indelibly marked by the place, as I am by the values and rules of the class that used it. It’s like a tattoo you got on a drunken night long ago and which peeks out from your sleeve to embarrass. It’s not that it helped fast-track me to university, or into a top job. I spent my 20s and 30s working in Left-wing theatre and then centre-Leftish journalism, and while hardly meritocratic, being an old or ex-Etonian wasn’t an obvious advantage in those fields. Not as much as was being white, male and privileged.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Privilege is a difficult concept – a word thrown around to the extent of losing much usefulness. But it is of enormous importance when you weigh up class and Britain today. It means more than entitlement: it is the ownership of a range of tools that, as any self-help book will tell you, are useful for a traditionally successful life. Self-confidence, self-belief, persuasiveness, and what used to be called ‘clubbability’.

I know an old Etonian who makes part of his living touring private schools giving lectures to the pupils on “charm” and how it gets you everything – headmasters’ wives love him.

Privilege gets many unquantifiable things that can turn out to be of enormous value: an understanding of how clubs and networks function, connections, a stamp of acceptability based on unspoken shared beliefs.

It is a freemasonry, and membership translates into jobs, wealth and power: it’s no wonder that the proportions of judges and senior lawyers, of armed forces top brass, of politicians and senior business leaders who were privately educated today is pretty much what it was 50 years ago. It works – a place at Eton for your son is not a bad bet, if you can afford it. The prizes are huge, and the odds on getting them still pretty favourable.

Politicians, both Left and Right, have attempted to address the gross inequality the system clearly perpetuates ever since Churchill encouraged Rab Butler to democratise the public schools during the war (see David Kynaston and Francis Green’s recent Engines of Privilege: the British Private School Problem for a fascinating history of this political failure).

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Yet while the products of public schools have always been among the institutions’ worst enemies, the institutions themselves have proved remarkably resilient. It is born of an inherent flexibility, the quality that has kept my class in power in Britain for so many centuries. You can come in, if you’ve got the money, or the brains, or the looks. It worked and still does: if it did not, the British would surely have risen and torn down those spires long ago.

There are two things around today that might challenge this long-fossilised situation. The first is financial. Eton – and everywhere like it – is very, very expensive today. It always was: 70 years ago the annual fee was “about the same as a Rolls-Royce, or keeping a mistress in Maida Vale,” as an old joke has it. But when my parents sent me there in 1974 the basic charge was £861, the equivalent of £9000 today. In 2019, a year at the school costs nearer £42,000, before extras.

Even at a private day school, the average is £15,000. Across the boarding sector fees are up 50% in 10 years. Sums like these can only hurt the traditional public-school customer base, the squirearchy and the professions. Can Etons populated solely by the children of the super-rich and a few scholarship-holders survive the political clamour to remove the tax-breaks and the schools’ (indefensible) status as charities?

My other thought is more speculative. I wonder if the Eton brand is now gravely tarnished. Many charges are commonly laid against Etonians and their class – arrogance, greed, callousness, and that’s just to start – but I think their fatal flaw might be an inherent lack of seriousness. “We are often told that they taught us nothing at Eton. That may be so, but I think they taught it very well.” said General Herbert Plumer – one of the “donkey” leaders of the first world war – when addressing an Old Etonians’ dinner in 1916.

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I think of Plumer when I read Boris Johnson at his bombastic heights. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really mean it. Etonian humour is a lovely thing – there’s a strong tendency to self-deprecation that seems very healthy – but it may also cover up many failings. Particularly when coupled with the abiding sense that the destiny, by right, of a young man leaving the school is to go out and make the world a better place.

The system seems – dangerously – to produce people who look like leaders, talk like leaders, but don’t lead very well at all. It is an old charge, but the list of failed Etonians is long today. At its top is David Cameron, the amiable schoolboy who liked a game of poker, and went on to take unforgivable gambles with Britain’s future, the price of which we are all now paying.

Your reaction to all this may well depend on where you went to school, or indeed if you went to “school”. But let me leave you this, from Alec Waugh. His account of Sherborne, The Loom of Youth, was published in 1919, to outrage at what now seem the tamest scenes of homosexual yearning. But it is the teenage Waugh’s savage assault on the public-school class and its hypocrisies that is more interesting. And yet, like most ex-public school boys, Waugh is, ultimately, ironic and ambivalent:

“He is selfish, easy-going, pleasure-loving, absolutely without a conscience. But he is a jolly good companion and the Freemasonry of a Public School is amazing. No man who has been through a good Public School is an outsider. He may hang around the Empire bar, he may cheat at business; but you may be certain of one thing, he will never let you down. Very few Public School men ever do a mean thing to their friends. And for a system which produces such a spirit as this there is much to be said after all.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?