Etonian

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

After addressing a working-men’s club in the East End of London, Eton headmaster Robert Birley said: ‘I pointed out to them that while people thought of the Suez policy of the Government as an “Eton” policy, because of the number of Etonians in the Cabinet, they had not recognised that both the junior members of the Government who resigned and the majority of the “dissident” Conservatives were Old Etonians. I said that what we wanted to do at Eton was to produce men who would hold independent views and be prepared to stick up for them, not men who would take an “Etonian” line.’10 Seven years later, another Conservative administration suffered a similar fate in 1963 when a privately educated politician lied to parliament about his personal life.

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Why waste time and valuable resources recruiting further down Britain’s rigid class ladder when the public schools delivered access to the top on a plate? The KGB’s pragmatic obsession with Old Etonians during the Cold War was no different to Putin’s fascination with the eleven schoolboys he had agreed to meet in August 2016. And when David Cameron and his fellow Etonian friend arrived in the Crimea in 1985, looking distinctly out of place on a gap-year break, it is hardly surprising that the KGB tried to recruit them. As it turned out they were really on to something. David Cameron’s effortless rise from home counties prep school to become the nineteenth Etonian prime minister was proof that the Kremlin’s foreign-agent recruitment policy was sound.

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Ministers and civil servants, who felt excluded from government, suspected that it was unhealthy to run Britain in such a narrow echo chamber.38 Helen Ghosh, a former Home Office permanent secretary, said that women were conspicuous by their absence from Cameron’s executive decision-making club, which she described as an ‘Etonian clique’. There were plenty of promoted OEs to support Ghosh’s claim. Boris Johnson’s brother Jo Johnson was appointed head of Cameron’s Downing Street Policy Unit, while Oliver Letwin was put in charge of developing cabinet policy. There were also key appointments outside government in Cameron’s gift to OEs. The Etonian son of his old headmaster, Eric Anderson, was made the independent reviewer of terrorism laws.39 By 2014, concern over the number of Etonians at the heart of government had become so serious that Cameron’s ally, Michael Gove, told the Financial Times that the numbers of Eton-educated advisers was ‘ridiculous and preposterous’.40 Gove, godfather to one of Cameron’s children, was the first Conservative education minister to send his child to a state secondary school and publicly argues that twenty-first-century prime ministers should be choosing from a much wider talent pool.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

James Wood, now a literary critic and Harvard professor, remembers Cameron as being ‘confident, entitled, gracious, secure . . . exactly the kind of “natural Etonian” I was not’. He remarks on Cameron’s ‘charm and decency [at Eton] – almost a kind of sweetness, actually’, though he says Cameron showed little interest in politics. (Rory Stewart, the writer-traveller, Conservative MP and another Etonian, once told me that he thought Cameron and Boris Johnson were the ‘wrong kind of Etonians’, which leads one to assume that there must be a right kind, of whom Stewart is presumably one.) Eton: a word of just four letters but with a multiplicity of associations.

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Eton style: pupils’ amusing spoof of the South Korean pop hit and YouTube sensation ‘Gangnam Style’ by Psy, but also a sense of the boarding school as one of the ultimate luxury British ‘brands’, and especially desirable to international plutocrats. Old Etonian: David Cameron is of course one such, and the nineteenth British prime minister to have attended the school. Ferdinand Mount, a cousin of Cameron’s mother, Mary, and a writer and journalist (and, inevitably, an Etonian), recalls the young Cameron ‘abounding in self-confidence’ when as a student he visited Mount while he was working for Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. At Brasenose College, Oxford, where Cameron read philosophy, politics and economics, his contributions in classes are remembered by a former economics tutor as being ‘thought out and charmingly delivered’.

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It is subtitled ‘Practically a Conservative’, which suggests that even the authors are unsure of Cameron’s true motivations or purpose; are unsure of what kind of prime minister he was, or would have been if only he’d won the 2010 election, against an unpopular and exhausted Labour government, and was free of those pesky Lib Dems, who acted as brakes on his more radical desires. Cameron’s back story is well known. He grew up in the Berkshire village of Peasemore, the younger son of an Old Etonian stockbroker, Ian, who was born disabled. Home was the Old Rectory (Cameron’s brother, Alex, who is a barrister, still lives there with his family), which has a large garden, with a swimming pool and tennis court. ‘Home was decidedly old-fashioned if not notably bookish,’ the authors write. The family was ‘very county’, we are usefully told.

The Man Who Was Saturday
by Patrick Bishop
Published 21 Jan 2019

One hundred and twenty-nine names were listed on stone tablets. When the time came to consider another memorial, the scale of the loss was very different. Between 1914 and 1918, the trenches of the Western Front, the grey wastes of the North Sea, the heights of Gallipoli and the baked earth of Palestine and Mesopotamia swallowed 1,157 Old Etonians. Various grand schemes were examined, including a tower in the style of the era of the school’s founder, Henry VI. In the end, the enormity of the loss defeated imagination. The death toll amounted to more than the number of boys at the school when war broke out (in 1914 there were 1,028 pupils).

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The invitation had come from the Political Society run by the boys, an initiative of Jo Grimond, who went on to lead the Liberal Party.* He wrote that when the school authorities learned of it, they were ‘vexed … However, they soon recovered their poise and fended off the indignant letters fired by blimpish Old Etonians.’ Gandhi, who wore his familiar loincloth as protection against the dank October Thames Valley weather, was ‘only a modified success. Mr Gandhi was long-winded and shuffled round all direct questions. He did not impress the boys.’5 Airey Neave noted in his diary that the Mahatma rose from his bed in the headmaster’s house long before dawn and ‘prayed from 4–5 a.m. in the garden’.6 That is as far as the entry goes.

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‘No one really doubts that the Oxford Union [which the year before had voted ‘in no circumstances to fight for its King and Country’] would go with the others when the time came.’ While he believed that ‘there are few people in this country who would not fight for England … I hope there are none who will fight for France.’ Six years later he would do just that. The essay appeared in a magazine called Sixpenny: Stories and Poems by Etonians. It had been started by Robin Maugham, nephew of the famous author, Somerset, and by the second issue Neave’s initials appear as a co-editor. The two had similar backgrounds. Maugham came from an Establishment family and his father was a high court judge. Their temperaments and their school careers, though, were quite different.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

He was the son of the canon at Windsor, a clergyman so ferocious he was said to have terrified even Queen Victoria. He tutored the King-Emperor, George V. His son, George VI, loathed Dalton and begged Attlee not to make him Foreign Secretary. This was probably a service to the nation because of the extreme nature of Dalton’s anti-German feelings but the King saw merely Dalton as a turncoat, an Etonian who rebelled against his class and monarch. Dalton had started out as a Tory and switched, partly as an act of rebellion against his father. He was sexually repressed and easily depressed. The poet Rupert Brooke had been one of those he adored. ‘My love’, he said much later, ‘is the Labour movement and the best of the young men in it.’

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Schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester might educate only some 5 per cent of the population, but they still provided the majority of political leaders, including many of Labour’s post-war cabinet. Parliamentary exchanges of the period are full of in-jokes about who was a Wykehamist and who an Etonian. Briefly, it had seemed such schools would not even survive the war: boarding schools had been in enough of a financial crisis for some to face closure through bankruptcy. Churchill’s own Harrow was one, along with Marlborough and Lancing, though all struggled on. More generally there was a belief that public schools had contributed to failures of leadership in the thirties and right up to the early defeats of the war.

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The historian Correlli Barnett was unkind, not unfair, to complain that Whitehall chose for the nationalized boards ‘administrators of their own kidney, sound chaps unlikely to rock boats, rather than innovative leaders strong in will and personality’.48 Coal was under Viscount Hyndley, a 63-year-old marketing man from the industry, an Etonian ran the gas boards and transport was overseen by Sir Cyril Hurcomb from the Ministry of War Transport, ‘a man whose entrepreneurial experience and knowledge of engineering were nil’. The political symbolism of taking over great industries on behalf of the people was striking but as politicians discover anew, every few years, talking about change and actually imposing it are very different things.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera
Published 28 Jan 2021

Do you imagine that if they had minded a little snow that Canada would ever have been added to the empire, or if they had minded heat we should ever possess India or tropical Africa? Never let me see you shrink from either heat or cold. You will have to maintain the empire which they made.’ Meanwhile, the lingering imperial tone of the twentieth-century Etonian education was conveyed in a recent essay in the London Review of Books by the literary critic James Wood in which he recalled how first-year Etonians of his generation were, for history, given a copy of Heaven’s Command, the first volume of Jan Morris’ trilogy about the rise and fall of the British empire, along with bits from the other two books. The trilogy is a lush, romantic account of the enormous, bloody, dust-filled adventure of empire.

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General Sir Eyre Coote, previously an MP and Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, was caught fondling and even flogging six teenage boys, aged fourteen and fifteen. The boys were members of the Christ’s Hospital School to which Coote made regular Saturday-morning visits for his own sexual gratification. In 1922, Lewis Harcourt, or ‘Loulou’, the ex-Colonial Secretary, exposed himself to a young Etonian boy, Edward James. Shocked at the sight of the ‘hideous and horrible old man’, James complained to his mother, and the story leaked into London circles. The scandal possibly took its toll on Harcourt, who was found dead in his dressing room after an overdose of Bromidia. In the 1820s, a missionary, the Rev.

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It is a feeling that is flattered by Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council: despite boasting only a fraction of China’s population, a mere portion of Russia’s surface area, a slice of the USA’s economic might and a smidgen of France’s culinary capabilities, we sit alongside these nations, with Theresa May in a speech at the UN General Assembly in 2017 talking about the ‘special responsibilities’ that the UK holds within the United Nations. And then there is the coronavirus crisis. Boris Johnson’s announcement at the beginning of the pandemic that thousands might die, led to one FT reader remarking online that his tone was defined by the ‘Etonian mindset that caused famines across the empire’ – ‘these lords and masters are trained to shrug it off with the certainty that they are the stewards of society, born and raised to make tough decisions.’9 Furthermore, every stage of the crisis has been characterized by the idea that Britain is a special case.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

'NANNY REQUIRED for delightful girls in West Byfleet,' reads one typical advert. And yet, despite being the sister of a senior Eton-educated Tory politician (although she argues that Boris Johnson's background is 'very different' from that of David Cameron), she expressed her disgust to me before the 2010 general election that 'the prospect is Old Etonians bankrolled by stockbrokers ... It's back to the days of Macmillan and Eden.' She has a point. All in all, twenty-three out of twenty-nine ministers in Cameron's first Cabinet were millionaires; 59 per cent went to private school, and just three attended a comprehensive. No wonder that, as one poll revealed, 52 per cent of us believe that 'a Conservative Government would mainly represent the interests of the well-off rather than the ordinary people.'

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'William's not actually the poshestsounding cadet, despite his family heritage, but he struggled to pull off a working-class accent,' one cadet told the Sun.ZIWelcome to twentyfirst-century Britain, where royals dress up as their working-class subjects for a laugh. To get a more detailed sense of what the' chav' phenomenon means to young people from privileged backgrounds, Ihad a chat with Oliver Harvey, an Old Etonian and president of the Oxford Conservative Association. 'In the middle classes' attitudes toward what you would have called the working-class, so-called chav culture, you've still got to see class as an important part of British life,' he says. 'Chav' is a word Harvey often hears bandied around beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford.

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Switch on Britain s Dream Homes or I Own Britain s Best Home and watch Melissa Porter and Rhodri Owen saunter round rural Britain ogling country mansions; watch grand properties being restored in Country House Rescue; zap over to A Place in the Sun and let Amanda Lamb give you a guided tour of wealthy Britons fleeing to buy up in Greece or Crete. Indeed, property programmes like Relocation, Relocation and Property Ladder are two-a-penny. Above all, posh is mostly certainly in. Watch Old Etonian chef Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall rustle up an organic treat; be dazzled by the public-school charm of other TV chefs like Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers; then enjoy the aristocratic Kirstie Allsopp encouraging you to gaze starry-eyed at unaffordable homes. Too much of our television consists of promotional spiel for the lifestyles, desires and exclusive opportunities of the rich and powerful.

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

Yet Private Eye, still looking like the home-made effort glued together on Mrs Rushton’s carpet, survives. Hislop’s refusal to put it online has secured print sales of quarter of a million copies every fortnight, poking fun at all-comers, as it always has. The very first edition took aim at the cult around an ageing Winston Churchill, who remained a back-bench MP, teased Harold Macmillan, the old Etonian PM, and even John F. Kennedy, who at 44 was being mocked for being too old and a cartoon suggested he might make way for a younger man. Two years later, when Harold Wilson became Labour leader his carefully cultivated public image was ridiculed with a cartoon showing him returning home and removing his face to reveal a blank behind.

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‘He hadn’t had time to learn the lines, so had pasted them up behind various pillars,’ Anderson told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson. ‘The whole performance consisted of him running from one side of the stage to the other and failing to read it properly.’ A star, and a star’s approach to preparation, was born. Other Old Etonians whose dramatic skills were better honed on Anderson’s watch include actors Damian Lewis and Dominic West. Anderson kept on moving. In 1995 he became rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, where one of the students during his time was his fourth future PM. Rishi Sunak was studying philosophy, politics and economics and graduated with a first in 2001, the year after Anderson had returned again to Eton, this time as provost.

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His pitch was simple: he was not Heseltine, the self-styled Tarzan swinging through the Westminster jungle, who had committed the sin of moving against the prime minister. Nor was he Douglas Hurd, whose education at Eton seems to have counted more against him in the Conservative Party of the early 1990s than other Old Etonians found more than a quarter of a century later. Not that Major was back on top form. Before each public appearance he was again dosed up on antibiotics and paracetamol. Derek Oakley, the husband of Major’s constituency secretary Barbara, trailed round after him forcing him to down more ‘pills and potions . . . even at one stage leaving them on my pillow, with a despairing note’.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
by Oliver Bullough
Published 10 Mar 2022

They were wealthy, they were male, they were southerners, they were privately educated; if they hadn’t studied at Eton, they went to Harrow. To have been educated at Winchester marked someone out as daringly nonconformist. Within this small world, tiny gradations of status assumed outsize significance. Cameron Cobbold, who headed the Bank of England before Cromer, is described by one historian as a ‘distinctly Etonian Etonian’, and once you’ve spent time listening to the interviews they gave and reading the transcripts of their speeches, you can see exactly what that means. Cromer, an heir to an earldom whose father organised the king’s engagements, could only have counted himself among the world’s unfortunates because he had never met anyone who was actually unfortunate.

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Malone might have found plenty to talk to an ex-public schoolboy about; he was bright and well educated, with an expansive and curious view of the world, which has persisted to the present day. But he never got to find out, because his officers never engaged with him, and he was always called – like a servant, or indeed like a younger child at school, which presumably came to the same thing for an Etonian at the time – by his surname. The levers of financial power in post-war Britain were controlled by the same people as before the war: the privately educated children of privately educated fathers, which gave them an extremely limited ability to understand the world. There is much debate in the academic literature about philosophical splits during this period.

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By the end of the 1960s there were more than a hundred foreign banks with branches in London, to the horror of the old City elite. This was not what they’d thought they’d signed up for at all. They had invented this accounting trick to make themselves some extra cash, but it had been seized upon by pushy outsiders who were now elbowing the old Etonians aside. ‘I’m not saying that their system’s not good for the Americans, in America, but I don’t think it’s very good here,’ said Cromer in that interview towards the end of his life. ‘One was much better informed of what was going on in days gone by because it was a smaller circle, I think, and people weren’t quite so much after what the Americans call “the quick buck”.’

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

The scenario above is sheer satirical fantasy, of course, and it is lazy of the Left to make political capital out of the fact that the chancellor made welfare savings while eating a burger, even if it was a more expensive burger than any the average welfare claimant could ever afford. But it is hardly a state secret that Byron burgers are extremely popular with the right-wing politicos who dwell in the leafy paradise of west London. Byron is run by Tom Byng, a member of the same Old Etonian cabal as David Cameron himself and Boris Johnson. And the mass of juicy meat that top Tories ate in Byng’s previous restaurant, Zucca, saw it described as the de facto works canteen of the Cameron set. Even Nicholas Clegg extols Byron’s succulent flattened beef pads. The coalition has bonded over Byron burgers, and all its key players are proud to stand before their fellows and declare, “Ich bin ein Byronburger.”

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New Byron branches in Manchester and Liverpool reflect similar spurts of gentrification. The rich are eating at Byron in places where the poor once ate at Chicken Cottage, a name I will appropriate for my rural retreat when I too am finally displaced from the capital. The food-press spin on the Old Etonian Tom Byng’s company is that it represents a kind of credible indie alternative to the corporate McDonald’s and Burger King chains. But earlier this month The Times reported that Jacob Rothschild, the father of Osborne’s Bullingdon Club associate Nat Rothschild, is considering buying Byng’s big burger business, though his plan to rename it as Bilder Burger has been seen as a potential PR disaster.

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Last week’s Daily Mail carried a full-page picture of Sarah Vine, partner of the education secretary, Michael Gove, emerging from a “bog standard” public toilet in Westminster, waving an ordinary toilet brush and declaring that her family will be using public toilets in future, and not the private facilities selected for the ablutions of the families of her husband’s Etonian colleagues. It’s easy to be cynical about a politician’s spouse using their family to score political points, but finding the original picture of Vine emerging from the Westminster toilet online, before Conservative HQ had cropped it, reveals an image every bit as damaging as that famously suppressed photo of George Osborne poking a proboscis monkey with a pencil.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

– NADINE EL-ENANY, NOVEMBER 20171 The questions are obvious. Who are we? What does ‘we’ mean in a state that encompasses four different nations? Where have ‘we’ come from? What diverse and contested histories have shaped ‘us’? Where are ‘we’ going – and where do ‘we’ want to go? The answers are a different matter … But the England of frivolous Etonians, the swollen House of Lords and the London-based elite is not the only England. – DAVID MARQUAND, JUNE 20182 INTRODUCTION The British, and especially the English, are not good at thinking about themselves except as being in competition with other peoples and countries.3 Today, that competition is most obvious when it comes to the football World Cup, but in the past it also concerned industrial prowess.

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Results of a survey of people in England carried out in May 2018.8 Fewer than half of all 18–24-year-olds in England are now proud of being English. Given this, and given that the young are traditionally the most rebellious, there are some questions to be asked and answered. Why don’t the British rebel against their leaders? One answer is that they have been taught that their leaders have incredible intellects (especially the Etonians), so it is folly to pooh-pooh them and, of course, the English are seen by so many within England as being naturally superior. There is a geography to this tendency. When surveyed in May 2018, some 90 per cent of respondents in Lincolnshire and the Midlands felt strongly that being English was something to be proud of, but less than half the populations of towns such as Liverpool and Manchester were proud of being English.

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Reprinted with kind permission of the British Library Board.53 In September 2017, with less than eighteen months before the leaving bell tolled, the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier told the world that the UK’s approach to leaving the Union was ‘nostalgic, unrealistic and undermined by a lack of trust’. Two weeks later, Prime Minister May suggested adding another two years before actually leaving, thereby prolonging the uncertainty and lack of clarity on trade deals. In mid-December 2017, both Boris Johnson and his fellow Old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg described a transition period as the UK becoming a vassal state of the European Union. They probably deliberately used a term that only ‘superior’ people imbued in the finer points of empire would know – but were actually using it inappropriately. The British are choosing their fate, it is not being forced upon them, and the EU is not threatening to invade, which is what the subjects of a vassal state would fear.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

It is worth recalling, for a bit of perspective, that sixty years ago in 1957 Anthony Eden’s Conservative cabinet of eighteen were all public school educated men and ten, including Eden himself, were old Etonians. Move ahead twenty-two years to Margaret Thatcher’s first cabinet in 1979 and all but two had attended public school, though the Eton count was down to six. John Major’s first cabinet in 1990 was also more than two thirds public school with the Eton quota a mere two. By contrast David Cameron’s first cabinet in 2010 was the first Tory-led cabinet in which over half its members had not gone to public school, twelve out of twenty-two, and he was the sole Etonian. Theresa May’s cabinet has an even lower public school representation, just five, but still with one very visible Etonian.

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Yet progress in this area is hard to measure and easy to discredit. The cynics always seem to be right about social mobility and meritocracy. Movements at the elite level such as the decline of state-school students at Oxbridge in the 1980s or, more recently, the political prominence of a few old Etonians, can attract all the attention while often disguising more profound shifts below the surface. And because social mobility, in particular, is such a complex phenomenon it is hard to design effective policy measures to promote it. Everything seems either too small, such as the Office for Fair Access trying to increase the number of poorer students in elite universities and the Social Mobility Commission trying to prevent well connected young people monopolising the best internships; or, on the other hand, too big and obvious, such as improving educational standards for poorer pupils.

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Theresa May’s cabinet has an even lower public school representation, just five, but still with one very visible Etonian. We should, of course, still worry about making our elite more open and representative but it is also worth recording that Britain is a less static society than many people think. Like Tory cabinets, British business has been moving in the right direction: in the late 1980s some 70 per cent of FTSE 100 chief executives were privately educated and today it is just 34 per cent (although that might be partly a function of the internationalisation of the business elite). According to one paper on class bias in elite jobs—‘Introducing the Class Ceiling: Social Mobility and Britain’s Elite Occupations’ by Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman—about half of those in elite occupations now come from non professional/managerial backgrounds and the proportion has been growing slightly in recent years.10 That is not simply a function of more ‘room at the top’ because the number of elite jobs grows more slowly than the bigger professional class categories—the proportion in such jobs increased from just 14 per cent to 17 per cent between 1980 and 2014.

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity
by Guy Hands
Published 4 Nov 2021

Yes, there was the occasional former public school boy but he was the exception rather than the rule. So, for example, we had an Old Etonian who used to regale us with stories of his schooldays – in particular, how on his seventeenth birthday he and his friends got very drunk, climbed up onto the roof of his house at Eton and hurled bottles into the quad below. When they came down, they were marched to the housemaster’s study where they received what he described as ‘a well-deserved caning’ – with the housemaster wishing him a happy birthday at the end of it. At Terra Firma, however, my Etonian found himself rubbing shoulders with people who ranged from comprehensive school kids, whose first language was often Bengali, to one of our managing directors, Mayamiko Kachingwe, who as a child had to make a 10-kilometre round-trip bicycle ride to school as one of the first cohort of Black students in a previously all-white government school in newly independent Zimbabwe.

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The various sides had largely held to a truce to allow candidates to concentrate on helping John Patten win the seat. But when it came to that term’s OUCA presidential elections, the gloves were off. I myself rejected the compromise candidate, Viscount Clive Mackintosh, in favour of Charlie Williams, an Etonian who believed that we needed to jettison the Tory Reform Group and Edward Heath’s ideas if we were going to move forward and change Britain. He mocked the truce cabal as ‘piss poor’ and in his manifesto even had a photo of him and his team apparently pissing on a tree to underline his point. He was a maverick, highly intelligent, very quick-witted and an outspoken spirit of nature.

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At Terra Firma, however, my Etonian found himself rubbing shoulders with people who ranged from comprehensive school kids, whose first language was often Bengali, to one of our managing directors, Mayamiko Kachingwe, who as a child had to make a 10-kilometre round-trip bicycle ride to school as one of the first cohort of Black students in a previously all-white government school in newly independent Zimbabwe. The two things that my Etonian and Mayamiko had in common were the caning they both received for infractions of school rules and the broad outline of their subsequent path in education. Mayamiko won an undergraduate place at Oxford University and proceeded to win a Rhodes Scholarship and earn a doctorate in economics. Such a diverse pool of talent resulted in an extraordinarily creative and dynamic environment, and also a very competitive one.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

In 1987 Britain’s social class bedevilled education as it bedevils it today. Choice, as a campaigner for state education told me, is a nice word for an often nasty process. I passed my teens under an Old Etonian cabal, presided over by Harold Macmillan: fifty-plus years later, I live again under an OE cabal. I asked my MP, Old Etonian Zac Goldsmith, how it came about that, in Cabinet terms, we were back in the 1950s. All the Old Etonians in the present government are, he assured me with a straight face, absolutely the best people among our 60 million fellow citizens to occupy the commanding heights. The distortion in opportunity is so obvious that those who benefit from it ought at least to recognize not just the advantages they are buying their children, but the consequences for the far greater numbers of the less fortunate.

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Inequalities in Britain are reported in dramatic terms in the United States. It is one of the few subjects that gets London-based American journalists off their bottoms: ‘THE TWO BRITAINS: the gap between stagnant north and prosperous south is wider than ever’ proclaimed a headline in Newsweek a few days before I travelled to Durham. It contrasted pictures of Etonians disporting themselves in fancy dress on the Thames with the children of the unemployed playing amidst the dereliction of a shattered housing estate. ‘Some housing projects in Manchester seem straight out of the Third World’, read one caption. Kids hanging out on a northern council estate – ‘For the country’s underclass, few prospects of a better life’ – were set against young people in evening dress at a party at St Paul’s public school – ‘Laps of luxury’.

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Wilson’s government was handsomely re-elected, giving its supporters hope that the country was about to make a final surge towards prosperity, better education, better health, better housing for all. Harold Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ boom had prepared the way, but now the people, freed of Supermac’s Old Etonian cabal and his seedy Edwardianism, would, as in 1945, again truly be the masters. A few miles from where the foundations were being laid for a neo-Napoleonic road system for Skelmersdale, the Beatles had been asserting the new egalitarian age: the class system, it seemed, was finally tottering from the British stage.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

I knew these trees in Indonesia as the haunts of beautiful demons who ripped your eyes out with their nails. I was led from the glass terminal into an older building, which had once been a police headquarters. Four men sat in Cameron’s outer office, with floppy hair and open-necked white shirts: speechwriter, head of strategy, chief of staff, chancellor’s chief of staff, all Old Etonians. I knew them because I had also gone to Eton, and I liked some of them. But I was astonished that Cameron could have filled his private office in this way. I employed 300 people in Kabul, including thirty foreigners, and not one had been to my school. Outside this office, Cameron had launched a campaign to bring in women and people from working-class and minority-ethnic backgrounds to be MPs – people like the British Asian public affairs professional Priti Patel, or the state-educated think-tank director Liz Truss.

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And yet his real inner team, and his closest friends, with whom he developed policy, were drawn from an unimaginably narrow social group. There were exceptions: Kate Fall, his deputy chief of staff, and George Osborne, his shadow chancellor, only appeared to have gone to Eton. This inner office, however, seemed to consist exclusively of that tiny slice of right-wing Old Etonians who had been engaged with Conservative politics since their twenties. I’d seen nothing like it in almost twenty years of working life. I was gestured through to an inner office, where Cameron sat in an open-necked, white shirt with its cuffs unbuttoned, leaning backwards on a green sofa. He indicated, without warmth, a small armchair, in which I sat primly, while he walked out to chat to his staff.

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But these were not the people who Cameron had been fast-tracking for the last five years to the Cabinet, or whom he meant when he said he was building a ‘modern, compassionate, Conservative Party and ending the idea that the Tories aren’t open to talent, to women, to minorities’. He meant nine people in particular. Not people on whose advice he relied, or whose judgement he particularly trusted: for that he still relied on his inner circle, and his Old Etonians. Not people who spoke particularly well in the House of Commons; some did, some didn’t. Not people with particular strengths in running departments: some of them were competent, others incurious, uncritical and inept. He meant the ‘team players’. Or so at least it appeared to my jaundiced eye. ‘I divide the world,’ Cameron liked to say, ‘between team players and wankers: don’t be a wanker.’

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

Firstly, there was no reference to shared economic interests, the profound links that bring together the big-business, financial and political elites. Secondly, his piece gave no sense of a common mentality binding the Establishment together. But there was one – although it was very different from the mentality that dominates today, despite the fact that, then as now, an Old Etonian Conservative (Anthony Eden) was in Downing Street. For this was the era of welfare capitalism, and an ethos of statism and paternalism – above all, a belief that active government was necessary for a healthy, stable society – was shared by those with power. The differences between Fairlie’s era and our own just goes to show that Britain’s ruling Establishment is not static: the upper crust of British society has always been in a state of perpetual flux.

…

Although the IPPR receives some trade-union money, its big funders include the tax-avoiding multinational Google; Capita, a private company that makes money by taking over public assets; and energy companies such as EDF Energy and E.ON UK. In other words, the IPPR can hardly be described as a think tank that is independent of the Establishment, let alone challenging it. Another self-styled ‘centre-left’ think tank is Demos, whose current director is David Goodhart, an Old Etonian who came to prominence by founding Prospect, a political magazine, in 1995, and whose overriding passion appears to be an almost obsessive opposition to what he regards as mass immigration. ‘The direction I very much want to take Demos in,’ Goodhart says, ‘is a “social glue” direction’ – by which he means social cohesion – ‘looking particularly at those difficult things for Labour, like welfare, immigration and multiculturalism’.

…

Many leading Tories had been perfectly content to uphold the post-war Establishment principles of state intervention, treating trade-union leaders as equals, and maintaining high rates of marginal tax. In the 1950s the Conservatives competed with the Labour Party over who could build the most council homes – anathema to the later Thatcherite principles of home ownership and leaving housing policy to the market. These post-war leaders were often patrician Tories, including Old Etonians such as Harold Macmillan. When in 1975 Thatcher became Tory leader, she felt isolated within her own shadow cabinet. Even in the early days of her premiership, she found herself battling the internal opposition of so-called ‘wets’, who feared the consequences of overturning the post-war order. In 1985 former Prime Minister Macmillan publicly compared Thatcher’s privatization policies to selling off ‘the Georgian silver’ and ‘all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon’.

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

Like Makiya, he could walk down most streets without being recognized. Said, Tariq Ali and the Marxists who first backed then abandoned Makiya gathered around New Left Review, the world’s foremost journal of Marxist theory for academic leftists. In 2000, on the journal’s fortieth birthday, its Old Etonian editor Perry Anderson let out a piercing howl of regret for the lost world of his youth. Like Karl Marx, he had expected so much for history, only for history to leave him beached. When he was a young man in the Sixties, Marxism had seemed a good bet. Communist tyrants ruled one-third of the world from Berlin to Shanghai.

…

As the leaders of other European countries acknowledged, Britain sought to wreck every initiative that might have ended the violence. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Prime Minister of Poland in 1993, said, ‘Any time there was a likelihood of effective action, a particular Western statesman intervened to prevent it.’ The Western statesman he had in mind was the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, an Old Etonian and son of a peer who had graduated to politics from Cambridge University and the Diplomatic Service. Hurd was every inch the English grandee: a calm and measured politician, who proved the breadth of his interests by writing thrillers that weren’t at all bad. His ally in government and successor at the Foreign Office was the Defence Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, an Edinburgh lawyer, whose putdowns were so polite on the rare occasions he was rude it was almost worth being insulted to hear them.

…

For 10 years New Labour stood cross-eyed in admiration as London was turned into the centre of the financial universe. From the sand bags Nick Cohen has watched as they turned their back on the working class, once the object of Utopian hopes on the Left and unreasonable fears on the Right, and lovingly embraced the upper class, once the object of surly contempt on the Left. In Waiting for the Etonians are gathered his selected writings that cover the span of Labour's love affair with the Right and the moral hazard that it has culminated in. It is a romance which has not only broken its traditional bond with the working classes and undermined the very values on which the party was founded, but has now left it with little more to do than warm the seat for the next Conservative Prime Minister.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

In spite of the scoffing, in spite of the negativity, in spite of the scepticism that you will hear from the other side, we will work flat out to deliver it.’5 That this is drivel is a given. What is striking, though, is the weird mixture of registers. Words like ‘implausible’ and ‘work flat out to deliver it’ come from a world of facts and processes. The Golden Age (as Rees-Mogg and Johnson ought to know from their Etonian education) comes from the world of cosmological myth. It is elaborated in Hesiod’s Works and Days as a long-ago era in which people had neither facts nor processes to worry about: Like gods they lived, with spirits free from care; And grim old age never encroached. The feast Where they moved limbs to music never ceased; Their hands and feet not ageing in the least.

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If this poisonous word can be avoided when it has no meaning, perhaps it can be used when it really is called for. 18 June 2019 It is becoming inevitable that Boris Johnson will win the Tory leadership contest and become prime minister. How does such an egregious liar rise so far? If lies were flies, the swarm around him would be so thick that Boris Johnson would be invisible. His gruff, mock-jovial Etonian tones would be drowned out by their incessant, deafening hum. There is ordinary political lying – evasions, circumlocutions, omissions, half-truths. And then there is Johnsonian lying – bare-faced, full-throated, unabashed. I wonder is this the real mark of how far British political life has fallen: people are so sick of the first kind of dishonesty that they actually find Johnson’s upfront mendacity refreshing.

…

When words bubble up from obscurity like this, they often tell us something about the zeitgeist, and spaffing is very Brexity. It is a public schoolboy term for male ejaculation. One of the earliest examples I can find in print is from an account in the Telegraph of a visit to a sperm bank: ‘I decided to spaff into a cup back in 2014.’ It has since come to mean any form of careless waste. Old Etonian Boris Johnson speaks, with exquisite bad taste, of money spent on police probes into historical child abuse allegations being ‘spaffed up the wall’. It seems apt, both that English public discourse would need a word to describe the pleasures of pointless self-abuse and that it would find it in the puerile vocabulary of its male elite.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Barker paid a heavy price for his success in terms of alienation from his kith and kin: he found himself wrenched away from his family and ‘attached to another centre’. When he returned home it was as a stranger, ‘with far-away interests, far-away friends, and a separate way of life’.72 But he succeeded in becoming one of the great academic figures of his generation, far more successful than most of the Etonians and Wykehamists who had been trained in Greek and Latin from the cradle: a fellow of an Oxford college, the principal of King’s College, London, professor of political science at Cambridge, and a knight of the realm. His earliest publications, predictably enough, were on Plato. Barker was a committed liberal, and indeed Liberal, who celebrated the unique role of the voluntary principle in British history in books such as Britain and the British People (1942).

…

Snow’s broadside on the ‘two cultures’, 55 per cent of A-level passes were in the sciences.11 Revolutions inevitably produce counter-revolutions, and the aristocratic spirit underwent a striking revival during the 1950s with the Churchill–Macmillan–Eden administrations and the Coronation of Elizabeth II. ‘Most of Macmillan’s ministers exhaled an upper-class Oxbridge fragrance,’ according to Noel Annan, whose nose for such fragrances was second to none, ‘and after his notorious 1962 reshuffle nearly half the cabinet were Etonians.’12 But the 1940s revolution resumed with a vengeance in the 1960s. Grammar-school products made it into Downing Street in the form of Harold Wilson and Ted Heath. Eldon Griffiths, a rising young Tory MP, told the House that ‘the people who have been variously described as the technocrats, the meritocracy or the salariat … they are the fulcrum of British politics.

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Hence the dramatic ending of the book: an anti-meritocratic spring in which the unmeritorious many rise up against the smug elite. The Rise of the Meritocracy represented a sharp change of direction in the public debate. Most of Young’s fellow socialists criticized the Britain of the late 1950s because it was run by a ‘magic circle’ of Old Etonians led by that great conjuror Harold Macmillan, the prime minister. Young criticized it for being too meritocratic. Most of Young’s fellow sociologists worried that IQ tests were inaccurate, measuring cultural advantage rather than native ability. Young worried that the tests were too accurate – and that they allowed the ruling class to identify talented children and kidnap them, as it were, from the working class.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

He looked up the IP address and then opened up Google Maps satellite view to see the neighborhood this person lived in. As Nix watched the screen, I began to watch him, taking such deep, nasty pleasure in the chance to ridicule and exploit others. It was classic Nix—or “Bertie,” as his pompous peers called him. Like many Old Etonians, he excelled at banter, flirtation, and entertainment. The directors of SCL assigned him to lead the firm’s side business of rigging elections in forgotten countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. It was with cabinet ministers of micronations that Nix was completely in his element. Performing the role of the English gentleman, he would give these politicians access to anything they wanted in the old imperial capital of London—the prestigious clubs frequented by royals and prime ministers, invitations to exclusive parties, or, if desired, the private company of elegant and open-minded women.

…

I began trying to avoid Nix at the office—everyone did, because he behaved so repulsively. His efforts to take me under his wing—to remake me in his image—were a dismal failure. Our backgrounds were too different, for starters. Even if I didn’t find Nix’s arrogance and snobbery appalling, I never could have disguised myself as a “respectable” Old Etonian, and his constant hectoring—what to wear, how to speak, etc.—only made me more self-conscious. We did occasionally bond over a mutual fondness for good whisky, but mostly I kept my distance. The projects that most engaged me were those that were doing some good in the world, such as programs to de-radicalize what the military affectionately called the YUMs—young unmarried males—in the Middle East and root out jihadist behavior.

…

Bannon did not need a second passport from a tropical nation. He was not looking for colonial cosplay in London, and he did not care how Nix pronounced his words or about the tailoring of his bespoke suit. Bannon wanted real things. It was deeply disorienting for a man accustomed to seducing ministers with scantily clad Ukrainian women and inebriated Etonian banter. Originally, Nix suggested to Bannon that we meet somewhere on London’s Pall Mall, a street lined with grand stone buildings. A couple of blocks north of Buckingham Palace, Pall Mall begins at Trafalgar Square and ends at St. James’s Palace, the sixteenth-century residence of several members of the royal family.

Why Orwell Matters
by Christopher Hitchens
Published 1 Jan 2002

But one may also notice the emergence of another trope: the author’s keen and sad interest in the passivity and docility of the victims, who know little or nothing of the wider mercantile world from which their nation is being excluded. This article was the latest in a series of occasional pieces written by ‘E. A. Blair’ — his Etonian and Burma Police name, not to be abandoned for Orwell until 1933 and the publication of Down and Out — for the Parisian radical press. The very first such essay was a study of censorship in England, published by Henri Barbusse’s weekly Monde, a sort of cultural-literary front-publication of the French Communist Party.

…

Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere.’ Certainly class is involved here — words like splendid and noble are applied by the officer corps to unusually good ‘specimens’ among the other ranks, and indeed Orwell found himself employing what Campbell describes as an Etonian accolade when he said that miners had figures ‘fit for a guardsman’. (The National Union of Mineworkers was known until the mid 1980s as ‘The Brigade of Guards of the Labour movement’.) Is there a hint of the homoerotic here? It’s difficult to argue confidently that there is not. We know that Orwell was teased heartlessly by Cyril Connolly while at Eton for being ‘gone’ on another boy and, while that might have been commonplace enough, we also have the claim by his friend and colleague Rayner Heppenstall that he was himself the object of an adult homosexual ‘crush’ on Orwell’s part.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

Indeed, the most expensive schools and colleges, both in Britain and the US, are now leading the way in liberal causes, whether it’s gender-neutral uniforms or no-platforming conservatives, and in America there is a clear correlation between how much a college charges its elite students and how intolerant it is of Right-wing speakers, a phenomenon nicknamed ‘radical privilege’ by one blogger.17 What better way to signal high status in the current year than banning conservatives from being able to speak? The year 2014 saw one of Britain’s top actors, the Old Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch, star in a film about a gay scientist persecuted for his sexuality in the repressive 1950s austerity era. So the following year our other top actor, the Old Etonian Eddie Redmayne, made a film about a transsexual woman. I’m not sure what Cumberbatch will do next to top that, but most recently he has taken to lecturing London theatre patrons on the importance of taking in more refugees, a quintessential moralised high-status cause for a high-status, elite audience.

…

Indeed the Thatcher government was not especially into social conservatism, and mostly focused on winning the economic arguments; pretty much the only anti-progressive measure they enacted, the now notorious Section 28 banning the promotion of homosexuality in schools, is stamped into the popular consciousness because it was so unusual. (It’s surely only a matter of time before one of our many old Etonian actors appears in a film about Section 28 with, I don’t know, a striking miner’s son growing up gay or something.) Academic dominance by the Left, and the inevitable intolerance that accelerated in the twenty-first century, was already a reality. Britain’s great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton recalled going to speak at Glasgow University in the mid-1980s where he discovered on his arrival that the philosophy department had staged an official boycott on the charges of ‘scientific racism’.

…

As former Prospect editor David Goodhart once recalled, his was a typical story in that ‘as a Left-wing student, I was in rebellion against a bourgeois background’. Goodhart was a 1970s radical, and remembered that ‘after breaking with the assumptions of my own upper-class background (my late father was a Tory MP) I became an old Etonian Marxist in my late teens and early twenties. Yes, how ridiculous, especially as my disaffection was probably triggered less by empathy for the wretched of the earth than by the setback of failing to reclaim my place in the 1st XI football team after an illness and failing to get into the 1st XI cricket team at all.’11 Indeed, as he pointed out, this was the same motive for the 1930s Marxist politician John Strachey, who ended up serving in the post-war Labour government, a political journey that started because he failed to make the Eton team.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

The unsophisticated nature of the concept can be boiled down to the fact that it views identity as the only important factor in society; white privilege holds the blatantly false idea that this privilege is somehow spread evenly through society. A white banker does not have the same level of privilege as a white factory worker, but the notion of white privilege suggests that both benefit equally from their oppressor status. It holds that a wealthy black Old Etonian is less privileged than a white man in Barnsley working several jobs in order to stay above the poverty line. The experience of the white working class, from the coal mines to the Somme, hardly equates to privilege, but fashionable theories provide a theoretical underpinning for elite sneering towards some of the economically less fortunate.

…

Having more diverse firms from entry level up is crucial to changing corporate culture. It’s essential that big business begins to show that it is taking diversity of economic and class background seriously. Boosting employment of women, LGBT and BAME people is important, but employing more black people from working-class backgrounds is very different to employing more BAME Etonians. Large businesses, who are already expected to file a gender pay gap report annually, should also be expected to report on how they are increasing socio-economic diversity. They should consider increasing the proportion of entry-level jobs offered to non-graduates and also changing recruitment practices to adopt methods such as the ‘CV free’ recruitment utilised by the likes of The Spectator.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

Sometimes, it’s actually been famous old boys and products of the system who’ve pointed this out, especially with regard to the kind of man the elite ‘top’ schools have been wont to turn out. Cyril Connolly claimed that ‘it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental’. When Old Etonian George Orwell lay in hospital at the end of his life, he described the man in the next bed, an old boy of a ‘good school’, in a way that suggests several major players in our current politics. ‘A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness & richness combined with a fundamental ill-will – people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful.

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The naming of the pub had proved hugely controversial, though. Aldermen and dignitaries in variously inflated states of affront and dudgeon took turns to rail against Orwell himself. Better, they said, to have named the pub after another famous George, that cheery banjolelist son of the town and recipient of the Order of Lenin, Formby, than the Old Etonian Orwell who had done nothing but traduce the town in his dreadfully downbeat book published down in London. Orwell, though, was not writing for the Lancashire tourist board. The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic intended to waken comfortable metropolitan Britain to what was happening to some of their countrymen.

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When the private sector has left you stranded and alone, when you cannot pay your way, when you are tired and heartbroken, the state, though a diligent, tireless and underpaid worker, will help you stand and carry on when the businessman will only ask what’s in it for him. When the market has left you friendless and alone, the state will still be there. I hope. I’m writing these words on the north-eastern fringe of the Lake District in the summer of 2019. As I write, a multimillionaire old Etonian, sacked twice for dishonesty, firstly by his newspaper, then by the leader of the Conservative Party, a man who described black people as ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, compared Muslim women to bank robbers and letterboxes, gay men as ‘bum boys’ and the EU to the Third Reich, the man who has lost the taxpayer £43 million in the half-baked vanity project the London Garden Bridge, abandoned without a brick being laid, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has just become the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 14 Aug 2011

All this he recounted in a broadcast on the BBC entitled ‘Memories of Iraq’, which was transmitted in 1942. His diaries of his time in Iraq paint a vivid picture of the reasonably civilized, enlightened time he spent there. He managed to celebrate 4 June 1919, a date which was remembered as King George III’s birthday at Eton, with some fellow Old Etonians in Baghdad. Five old boys of that school attended a dinner at the officers’ club, where they dined on ‘fish mayonnaise, iced soup, chicken, roast lamb’, followed by ‘trifle pudding’, rounded off with a savoury dish of ‘sardines on toast’.22 Bowman was fortunate. He missed much of the action which quickly threatened to overturn Britain’s position in Iraq.

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In the pleasant warmth of the Cairo sun, at favoured colonial-era haunts like the Shepheard Hotel, the Middle East experts of the British Empire gathered and, for three weeks, discussed the various problems which faced Britain in this turbulent part of the world. From Cairo, on 23 March, Gertrude Bell wrote to Humphrey Bowman, the Old Etonian Arabist, that the ‘stream of nationalist sentiment’ was often ‘the only visible movement’ in Arab politics.43 The most famous man at the conference of the ‘forty thieves’, as Churchill called it, was undoubtedly T. E. Lawrence, an ‘object at once of awe and pity’.44 Lawrence continues to fascinate Western minds, influenced perhaps unduly by what is perceived to be the romance of the East.

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At the end of that month, Patrick Wright, the head of the Middle East Department at the Foreign Office, had the ‘impression that Shell were not proceeding actively with this scheme’.34 But it was simply political circumstance, not any qualms about the nature of the Iraqi regime, which put the brakes on an oil deal with Iraq. Even after the Yom Kippur War, the Foreign Office official Stephen Egerton, an Old Etonian and Cambridge-educated Classics scholar in his late thirties, frankly admitted in December of that year that the ‘Iraqi regime is repressive and on occasion hostile; but it is apparently well in control’. Besides, Egerton argued, the Iraqis were ‘more anti-Soviet’ than they used to be.35 In the matter of oil politics, and in the context of the Cold War, the nature of the regime was secondary to stability.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

He presides over a cabinet containing more members of the 1 per cent than has been the case for decades, and has appointed a series of close advisors not just from the 1 per cent, but often from his own school; and, hardly surprisingly – and unlike Mr Obama – he does not explain to his electorate how the business strategies of his friends have impoverished the middle of British society. As even Cameron’s secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, complains: ‘Mr Cameron, who went to Eton, numbers four Old Etonians among his inner circle: Oliver Letwin, minister for government policy; Jo Johnson, head of his policy unit; Ed Llewellyn, chief of staff; and Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s chief economic adviser.’42 Is it any wonder inequalities in the UK continue to rise? In the UK the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, although to the left of Obama, takes conspicuous care not to enrage the 1 per cent.

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Which continues: ‘ “It doesn’t make me feel personally uncomfortable because I like each of the individuals concerned, but it’s ridiculous”, Mr Gove said. “I don’t know where you can find some such similar situation in a developed economy.” ’ G. Parker and H. Warrell, ‘Gove Takes Aim at Cameron’s Etonians’, Financial Times, 14 March 2014. 43. P. Wintour, ‘Ed Miliband Attacks Coalition’s Growth Strategy in which Rich Will Gain Most’, Guardian, 17 March 2014. 44. ‘He was later widely reported as saying that Labour would “tax the rich until the pips squeak”, which Healey denied.’ Denis Healey, at en.wikipedia.org. 45.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
by Alwyn W. Turner
Published 4 Sep 2013

That evening, the BBC and ITV news bulletins produced graphics to illustrate how the electoral process worked; both followed the conventional wisdom of the day and showed Major coming last and being knocked out, leading to a final third-ballot showdown between the flamboyant self-made millionaire Heseltine and the patrician Old Etonian Hurd. In the real world, to the surprise of the media, it took just four days for Major to move into Number 10, having seen off both rivals with no need for that final ballot. His opening words to his first cabinet as prime minister summed up the mood of a perplexed public: ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’

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Major was clearly not cast in the same mould as, say, Douglas Hurd – the former Eton head boy turned diplomat, whose father and grandfather had both been MPs – rather his story seemed the living embodiment of Thatcher’s promises to those who aspired to better themselves. It was widely assumed therefore that he bought into her ideology. Certainly that was her feeling. ‘I don’t want old style, old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me,’ she observed. ‘John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is.’ There was at least some truth in this perception. As prime minister, Major’s evocation of a classless society echoed Thatcher’s mindset, even as it pointed the way forward to Tony Blair and New Labour.

…

He also dismissed the Back to Basics campaign, saying it ‘meant nothing’, though ‘the core aspects are very popular – more people locked up, kids forced back to school. I don’t care what liberals with a small “l” think.’ Nonetheless, he returned to the fold for the 1997 general election, devising the controversial – if unsuccessful – ‘demon eyes’ poster. Meanwhile, Cameron (‘a suave Old Etonian’ according to the Guardian, and ‘one of the brightest young men in the party’ according to The Times) went on to become adviser to Norman Lamont, for whom he was said to have coined the phrase ‘green shoots of recovery’. After Lamont’s fall, he made an easy transition to a similar position under Michael Howard.

The Road to Wigan Pier
by George Orwell
Published 17 Oct 1972

But Orwell’s representatives, his wife, Eileen, and his agent (Orwell had by then gone to fight in Spain), refused to allow the text to be cut; so Gollancz felt constrained to write a foreword. Particularly in its second half his commission had (to use an often misused phrase in its exact sense) given him more than he had bargained for–a ‘highly provocative’ piece, he said pawkily, as he twisted and turned to protect his readers and his club’s ideological purity from this rude old Etonian. There would be little point in referring to that foreword today if it were not a classic minor document of English middle-class left-wing intellectualism and a striking example of much Orwell was attacking. Gollancz can accept a lot in Orwell’s description of working-class life; yet, for example, he tut-tuts nervously when Orwell says that working-class people are believed by middle-class people to smell, which, indeed, they did.

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It is noticeable that he still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music, ballet, are still recognisably bourgeois tastes; most significant of all, he invariably marries into his own class. Look at any bourgeois Socialist. Look at Comrade X, member of the CPGB and author of Marxism for Infants. Comrade X, it so happens, is an old Etonian. He would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but you notice that he still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone. He idealises the proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs. Perhaps once, out of sheer bravado, he has smoked a cigar with the band on, but it would be almost physically impossible for him to put pieces of cheese into his mouth on the point of his knife, or to sit indoors with his cap on, or even to drink his tea out of the saucer.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
by Peter Pomerantsev
Published 29 Jul 2019

His methodology was slow and expensive. His clients could be the sort of rulers who might hire him, take his research and then refuse to pay; and as they were in countries where the courts were not exactly independent, there was little Oakes could do to get his money. In 2008 another Etonian, Alexander Nix, joined SCL. He was a different type of Etonian to Oakes: he came from a fabulously wealthy background, had studied art history at university and his friends called him ‘Bertie’, a nickname out of Edwardian England. Oakes says Nix wanted to drag the research into the digital age, wanted to make money. He was better with clients.

Arabian Sands
by Wilfred Thesiger
Published 15 Sep 1959

In fact, of course, the modernist revolutions in art, science and politics were underway before his birth. Picasso, Proust, Einstein, James Joyce and Mao were all old enough to be his father. While Thesiger was lion-hunting in the Sudan, his fellow Etonian George Orwell was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. When Thesiger was living with the Marsh Arabs, another fellow Etonian, Aldous Huxley, was experimenting with gurus and LSD in California. If Thesiger seemed old fashioned this was in part his conscious choice. His answers to the students were deliberately camp and provocative. He was aware that most of the audience had no idea what First Field Colours were (they are awarded to the best performers in the Field Game – a sport played only at Eton).

…

His love of the freebooting life of the raiders encouraged him to believe that all modern development was for the worst and that modern cities were ‘an Arabian nightmare, the final disappointment’. He can be naive, superficial and even offensive, such as when (in his autobiography) he praises the Ethiopian race because ‘they had not been mongrelized’. It is not surprising, therefore, that another Etonian explorer, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, seeing Thesiger’s prejudices, aristocratic manner and suits, should conclude on their first meeting, like many others, that Thesiger was ‘an archaic figure, caught in a time warp, with excessively reactionary views’. Nevertheless, Thesiger’s painful participation in such eccentric environments is valuable.

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence
by Christopher Andrew
Published 27 Jun 2018

Hall seems to have had a weakness for Old Etonians. In December 1914 he made one of Room 40’s earliest recruits, the Old Etonian Lord Herschell, Lord in Waiting to George V, his personal assistant. Convinced that he required ‘men of wider experience of the world’ than the Admiralty or Whitehall could provide, he took on as a second personal assistant the Old Etonian stockbroker Claude Serocold, who struck Frank Birch as a ‘slim, well groomed creature with a black moustache’ (later removed). Through Herschell and Serocold, Hall recruited mostly well-connected German-speakers from a variety of professions. The Old Etonian publisher Nigel de Grey, depicted by Birch in Alice in ID25 as ‘the Dormouse’ (‘very quiet and apparently asleep’), rivalled his fellow Old Etonian Dilly Knox as the ablest codebreaker in Room 40.81 After the Germans’ transatlantic cable was cut by the British at the outbreak of war, the officially neutral but pro-German Swedes allowed them to use the Swedish cable to communicate with German diplomatic missions in the New World.

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On 29 November 1775 it created the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the distant ancestor of today’s CIA, for the sole purpose of ‘Corresponding with our friends in Great Britain, Ireland and other parts of the world’.† Two weeks after its foundation the Committee wrote to one of the first of its secret correspondents, Arthur Lee, an American-born Old Etonian lawyer resident in London: It would be agreeable to Congress to know the disposition of foreign powers toward us, and we hope this object will engage your attention. We need not hint that great circumspection and impenetrable secrecy are necessary. The Congress rely on your zeal and ability to serve them, and will readily compensate you for whatever trouble and expense a compliance with their desire may occasion.

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What was then passing in his mind could possibly have solved a problem that was to win a battle.77 Ewing also recruited a series of other academics, mostly classicists and German linguists, from Cambridge and other universities. They included, in addition to Knox, two other Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge. Frank Adcock (later knighted and Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University) arrived at about the same time as Dilly. The Old Etonian King’s historian Frank Birch arrived in 1916.78 Birch was a brilliant conversationalist and comic actor who later appeared in pantomime at the London Palladium and wrote a comic history of Room 40, Alice in ID25, which included a celebration by Knox of his bathtime brainwaves: The sailor in Room 53 Has never, it’s true, been to sea But though not in a boat He has yet served afloat – In a bath at the Admiralty79 In the Second World War Birch and Adcock were to take the lead in recruiting one third of the King’s Fellowship to Bletchley Park (including its greatest cryptanalyst, Alan Turing).80 But for the experience of the contribution made by King’s eccentrics to codebreaking in the First World War, it is unlikely that Turing would have been recruited in 1939.

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya
by Nicholas Best
Published 9 Aug 2013

One lady, riding her bicycle to a rehearsal of Trial by Jury, was nearly trampled to death in the street by a herd of frightened zebra. 1906 was also famous for an official visit to the protectorate by one of Queen Victoria’s sons. The Duke of Connaught sailed out with wife and daughter to inspect the latest addition to the imperial collection. An Old Etonian named Jim Elkington invited the three of them to lunch at his farm outside Nairobi. Mindful of social niceties, Elkington went to considerable trouble beforehand to ensure that his servants were fully clued up on the correct way to serve a meal to the King-Emperor’s brother. The operation went like clockwork until after lunch, when the party moved into the garden to have a cup of home-grown coffee.

…

In that case they would cut off only the hands and put them in a sack to be identified later by fingerprint experts, leaving the rest of the corpse to be devoured by hyenas. It was a grisly, unpleasant business. Nobody liked doing it. But they were fighting hard-core Mau Mau on their own terms, and they believed they were doing right. One European pseudo, an old Etonian, felt so badly about it that he adopted a Kikuyu baby orphaned in a forest action and brought it up as his own child. Since the use of white pseudos was for obvious reasons a closely kept secret, blacked-up Europeans attempting to return to base through the outskirts of the forest frequently found themselves being chased by the Kikuyu Guard or orthodox British army patrols who had mistaken them for Mau Mau.

Kill Your Friends
by John Niven
Published 7 Feb 2008

James Trellick is a generic toff, the end product of a lineage of fine dining and arse-fucking the poor that stretches back to the Domesday Book. He’s tall and pointlessly handsome with the questing, jutting cleft chin that seems to be standard issue to his class. But it’s the voice that really does it; an oak-and-gilt Etonian baritone, the sound of someone brought up to run the empire. “Nearly done,” Schneider says, leaning back, eating a green apple. “He wants to have a playback for everyone in a couple of weeks.” Schneider is like a weedier, discount, Jewish version of Trellick; similar clothes not filled out so well, a more minor public school, his voice a thinner, reedier take on Trellick’s fruity rumble.

…

“There’s a good live review of the Lazies in there,” I say but he just stares at the magazines dumbly, perhaps feeling too keenly the distance between bis old life and his current one. “Why is this happening to me?” he says to no one. “Listen,” Trellick says, using his best let’s-get-a-grip-shall-we? Etonian voice as he counts off the positives on his fingers, “a) you’ll get bail next week, b) the company will pay it, whatever it is, and c) that was an old computer in your office. Christ knows who’s used it over the years.” Trellick talks law for a bit, burden of proof, beyond reasonable doubt stuff.

The Last Job: The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist
by Dan Bilefsky
Published 22 Apr 2019

As Perkins drove through Enfield, past Polish specialty food shops, Turkish restaurants, and council estates, the two candidates in the election, the incumbent prime minister David Cameron, and Ed Miliband, the challenger from the left-leaning Labour Party, were about to make their final pleas to voters. Perkins was working class to his core, and Cameron, an Old Etonian who talked as if he had a plum in his mouth, irked men of his ilk. He told Spencer that he liked to vote conservative. He also loved Margaret Thatcher, he said. She had been one tough old bird, and he still credited her for low income taxes and a muscular foreign policy—invading the Falkland Islands, showing the French and Germans who was boss, telling Brussels to bugger off—that had made Britain a country to be reckoned with.

…

As the daring antics of the Hatton Garden heist grabbed headlines, Britons of all ages and classes marveled at the old men who had managed, like the Great Train robbers before them, to buck the establishment. And while the government of Conservative prime minister David Cameron was not rocked by scandal as in the days of Harold Macmillan during the Great Train Robbery, the occupant in No. 10 Downing Street was an Old Etonian “toff,” presiding over a country that remained deeply polarized by social and class divisions. That helped burnish the aging gang as working-class heroes akin to the Great Train robbers decades earlier. For the dedicated men and women of the Flying Squad, the tendency of the media—and everyday Britons—to idolize the men was a source of deep frustration, since they had, in fact, stolen millions of dollars of valuables.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

Negotiations resumed, but had got nowhere when, in 1979, responsibility passed to a newly appointed minister of state at the Foreign Office, Nicholas Ridley. He was not interested in foreign affairs. Mrs Thatcher had placed him there as a counterweight to Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary, and his deputy, Ian Gilmour, who were both in the aristocratic One Nation Tory tradition she so distrusted. Ridley, too, was an old Etonian and the brother of an earl, but unusually for someone of that background, he was also a Thatcherite, whose loyalty to her never wavered. He was also the last British minister to attempt to resolve the Falklands issue. He twice made the 16,000-mile round trip to Port Stanley, hoping to persuade the islanders of the merits of a lease-back deal.

…

The pictures captured the attention of Tina Brown, editor of Tatler, and inspired waves of students to ape this behaviour. Jones said in a recent interview: ‘I had access to what felt like a secret world. There was a change going on. Someone described it as a “last hurrah” of the upper classes.’34 One of the stars of this new firmament was Darius Guppy, an old Etonian who helped revive the Bullingdon Club, whose antics had been recounted in Waugh’s novels. Guppy later went to jail for fraud. Another was Count Gottfried von Bismarck, a descendant of Prussia’s Iron Chancellor, who liked to dress up in lederhosen or in women’s clothes, lipstick and fishnet stockings.

…

But he was not interested in implicating himself in a bid to remove Thatcher unless he could be sure of success. The conspirators then turned to the former cabinet minister, Ian Gilmour, but he also did not want to impale himself in a contest he was sure to lose. At this point, a little-noticed MP named Sir Anthony Meyer stepped forward. Meyer was an old Etonian, a former diplomat, and a man whose pro-Europeanism meant that he had never been considered for a government post. His decision to challenge Thatcher ended his parliamentary career, when his constituency party sacked him. It also prompted the tabloids to uncover his long affair with a black blues singer, which came as no surprise to his forgiving wife.

Spitfire: A Very British Love Story
by John Nichol
Published 16 May 2018

The most successful pilots were those who got in close before opening fire, sometimes seeing pieces fly off the pilot as well as his plane. They were experiencing the full spectrum of emotions that came from fighting a fellow human being to the death. For some it was a killing rage, for others cold, clinical and remote. Nineteen-year-old Tim Vigors’ first success over Dunkirk felt similar to bagging a pigeon. The Anglo-Irish Old Etonian of 222 Squadron said: ‘I was aware that I had killed a fellow human being and was surprised not to feel remorse. Of course, Hitler’s atrocities had been well-publicised and we had got into the way of identifying all Germans with their leader.’16 LATE MAY 1940 Bernard Brown With Dowding limiting Spitfire numbers, the RAF threw whatever they could into the fight.

…

The Leicester Square venue was filled with its usual smoke, banter and close dancing. After all, the club was, according to the press, the ‘night-time headquarters of society’. And they were probably right. On one side of Diana was Max Aitken, fighter pilot and son of Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook. On the other was Old Etonian, Oxford graduate, British international skier, stockbroker and Hurricane ace Billy Clyde. The two men were listening intently, and with a degree of jealousy, as Diana described what it was like to fly the latest Spitfire. ‘What’s it like for blind flying?’ Aitken asked in passing. He referred to the pilot’s necessary skill for poor weather, when they had to rely on a few key instruments to stay aloft: the altimeter, artificial horizon indicator, airspeed and the climb and descent indicator.

…

A clean-shaven captain in an ironed uniform emerged from a dugout. The words were spoken in a cut-glass accent by someone who could only have been to bloody Eton. Charnock always wore his Old Harrovian scarf when flying in his Spitfire, in the knowledge that in his permanently unkempt state it would be a snub to the establishment in general and rival Old Etonians in particular. The officer handed over a canteen. Charnock took a swig, half in expectation that his throat would be delightfully lit with the sting of something strong. It was water. He turned on his heel and left, still swigging the canteen. At the rear lines, Charnock found a truck heading in the direction of Souk-el-Arba and got a lift.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

And to round off his denunciation of the ‘magic circle’, Macleod claimed that Randolph Churchill’s book was the ‘trailer’ for the ‘screen play’ memoirs of the magician-in-chief himself, Harold Macmillan.56 The arch-fixer shrugged off the Macleod attack with studied (perhaps feigned) insouciance about the Old Etonian claim, but the outgoing PM nonetheless realized how damaging Macleod’s piece really was in an election year. Macleod, he wrote in his diary, has fairly put the ‘cat among the pigeons’. His article is very cleverly written on the whole … But the really damaging part of his attack is on the alleged determination of the small inner ring (Macmillan; Redmayne; Manningham-Buller etc.) to have an Etonian! This, of course, just suits the press today, most of which loves to attack Eton and the ‘aristocracy’.

…

Even Tam Dalyell, who was very close to Crossman, had anticipated (as he told me everyone else did too) that Wilson would concentrate on attacking Macmillan and his government. Instead they heard this brilliant, constructive speech that captivated and inspired. Dalyell had been elected MP for West Lothian at a by-election the previous year. An Etonian by schooling, a schoolteacher by profession, a historian and an economist by degree, he had a deep interest in science and had helped Crossman to gather the scientific minds at no fewer than thirty-four meetings in 1963–4.10 He subsequently believed that Wilson’s white heat was genuinely felt in the ballot boxes on 15 October 1964.

…

That enduring mark was made partly by the two words in Macleod’s book review that instantly took their place in the enduring lexicon of British political language – ‘magic circle’. The term even has its own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.55 The thrust of Macleod’s argument was that a ‘magic circle’ of old Etonians had fixed the succession for one of their own, that ‘from the first day of his premiership to the last, Macmillan was determined that Butler, although incomparably the best qualified of the contenders, should not succeed him’. In Macleod’s view, Butler possessed ‘the priceless quality of being able to do any job better than you think he will’.

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City
by Jack Brown
Published 14 Jul 2021

The following week, the Daily Mail praised May for fighting for the Brexit cause against ‘a well-heeled group of London “intellectuals” which is used to having everything its own way’, a group that included anyone from the BBC to prominent politicians.59 Six months later, May announced a general election, at which she lost her majority. The prime minister resigned on 7 June 2019, having repeatedly failed to get her Brexit deal through parliament. Her successor, the darling of the Leave campaign, was to be an Old Etonian former mayor of London and resident of Islington. The Johnson administration The Johnson government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda has been heavily focused on funding new transport projects, along-side electrification and ‘smart ticketing’. Before the coro-navirus pandemic hit, the government pledged to invest £100 billion in infrastructure.60 Some questioned this emphasis on transport, arguing that regions need better skills provision, housing, or commercial space, alongside stronger local governance with more devolved powers,61 but the sums discussed were undoubtedly impressive.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

Their support was guaranteed, despite the rush rightwards – indeed, middle England willed it, asking why it took so long for the Tories to become the sadistic, authoritarian, nationalist party they were by 2019. Cameron, May and Johnson represented an identifiable class – possessors, aspirants to possession and the deferential – at a time when, paradoxically, resentful class consciousness was advancing, though a big effort was made to cloak it non-threateningly as ‘social mobility’. Etonians ruled just as we became more acutely aware of the UK’s (or should that be England’s?) rigid social selection. The stage was stormed: too few working-class actors were playing alongside Benedict Cumberbatch (Harrow) or Eddie Redmayne (Eton). Access to universities, the arts, consultancy, journalism or the law was found to be barred to those lacking the correct background and education.

…

But they could rely on friendly journalists, a collective failure of nerve on the part of broadcasters and – it has to be admitted – the public’s receptivity. Two-thirds of them heard about the claim painted on the big red bus. The UK Statistics Authority intervened to condemn this ‘misuse of figures’. Its impotence was another facet of the age. The Etonians and Nigel Farage of Dulwich College whistled racist and xenophobic tunes. Johnson, of Turkish extraction, warned direly of impending invasion by 80 million Turks, at the same time as the leave campaign gulled citizens of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent with the promise that exiting the EU would mean more visas.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

Eden, an Old Etonian himself, disagreed. He pointed out that the Eton College Officer Training Corps was a shambles. His protests were in vain: one of the first things Hitler did after the outbreak of the Second World War was to arrange for Eton to be bombed. Two bombs fell on the school. One shattered all the glass in the college chapel; the other narrowly missed a library full of boys studying. There were no reported casualties. When parents asked for the pupils to be moved to a safer location, the Headmaster, Charles Elliott, refused. If London’s poor couldn’t leave London, he said, Etonians wouldn’t leave Eton.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

She was thus confirmed as prime minister by her conference and will face no challenge unless she fails in major policy areas. But her confirmation as undisputed party leader was bought at the price of raising the concern, anger and determination of her fellow heads of government in Europe. Margaret Thatcher was an economic liberal, while Old Etonian Tory prime ministers such as Harold Macmillan and David Cameron were cultural and social liberals. In the name of provincial southern English Tory nationalism, May began burying Tory liberalism and internationalism at her party conference. Her successor as home secretary, Amber Rudd, said that firms in Britain should publish lists of names of foreigners whom they employed.

…

When the six continental nations decided to move forward to a broader common market Britain again kept its distance. Hapless Tory prime minister Anthony Eden refused to participate in the Messina conference in 1956 which negotiated the Treaty of Rome. Eden is more famous in history for the disaster of his Suez invasion fiasco, when President Eisenhower called him and said: ‘Anthony. Are you mad?!’ His Old Etonian successor, David Cameron, had managed to achieve both the disaster of his intervention in Libya (jointly with Nicolas Sarkozy) and Brexit, and future historians will struggle to find a British prime minister with a record of such spectacular failure as Cameron’s plebiscite. In 1956, Eden despatched a minor Whitehall civil servant to Messina with Britain’s message to Europe’s prime ministers: ‘Gentlemen, you are trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate.

The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war
by Michael Smith
Published 30 Oct 2011

One of the first of these naval instructors turned codebreakers was Alastair Denniston, a diminutive Scot known to his colleagues as A.G.D. and by close friends as Liza, who would become the first head of Bletchley Park. But by far the most productive source of codebreakers was the universities. Ewing went back to his old college, King’s, Cambridge, to bring in two Old Etonians: Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, one of the most brilliant and most eccentric of the codebreakers, and Frank Birch, a talented comic and famous actor, who would later appear in pantomime at the London Palladium as Widow Twanky in Aladdin. Other eminent recruits, almost entirely Old Etonians, included William ‘Nobby’ Clarke, a lawyer whose father had been Solicitor-General and had represented Oscar Wilde during his 1885 trial for gross indecency, and Nigel de Grey, a publisher whose diminutive stature and unassuming nature led the more extrovert Birch to dub him ‘the Dormouse’.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

In March 2018, City A.M. reported that Singham and his trade team had been “poached” by the Institute for Economic Affairs.35 The so-called ‘brains of Brexit’ was now at the heart of one of the oldest and most influential libertarian think tanks in British politics. * The Institute of Economic Affairs is possibly the most successful British export that most people have never heard of. In 1955, two eccentric Britons, Old Etonian Antony Fisher and his friend Major Oliver Smedley, established a new venture from their pokey office down a nondescript alleyway in the City of London. Its goal was to promote free market economics. The pair had already set up a succession of unsuccessful organisations along similar lines: the Cheap Food League, the Council for the Reduction of Taxation, the Reliance School of Investment.36 But the IEA would be different.

…

Can anything be done to stop what a British parliamentary inquiry called Silicon Valley’s “digital gangsters”? * By the time the ICO’s enforcement officials walked into 55 New Oxford Street, Cambridge Analytica had already become a byword for political manipulation and malfeasance. Nix, a bespectacled Old Etonian who dresses well but not ostentatiously, had publicly bragged about the power of Cambridge Analytica’s sophisticated psychographics and online targeting during the 2016 presidential election. He was even more loose-lipped in private. Speaking with an undercover reporter from Channel 4 News posing as a potential client, he boasted that Cambridge Analytica could entrap rival candidates in fake bribery stings.

Ma’am Darling
by Craig Brown
Published 28 Jul 2017

Often I think back to that first day I saw him and how I watched him briskly stepping out along the pavement with his head in the air and a spring in his step and I wish that he had walked away and never returned to claim Margaret’s hand in marriage.’ 38 Yet, for all Tony’s faults, she might have done worse. After all, many men, not all of them quite savoury, had once entertained the idea of walking her up the aisle. Like many a schoolboy, Jeremy Thorpe enjoyed indulging in fantasies about his future. Aged sixteen, he entertained his fellow Etonians by delivering the balcony speech he would one day address to a tearful crowd upon standing down as prime minister. Another fantasy ran alongside it: one day in the not-too-distant future, he planned to marry Princess Margaret. A year older than the Princess, handsome, well-connected and amusing, he felt himself well placed to achieve this ambition.

…

Following Jeremy Fry’s withdrawal from the role of best man at the forthcoming wedding ‘owing to a recurrence of jaundice’,* Armstrong-Jones put forward the name of Jeremy Thorpe. A discreet investigation on behalf of MI5, the Chief Constable of Devon, Colonel Ranulph ‘Streaky’ Bacon, revealed that while the friendship of Armstrong-Jones and Thorpe was ‘nothing more than two Old Etonians catching up with each other’, it was ‘fairly common knowledge in Devon’ that Thorpe was homosexual. It was felt that this was enough to disbar him from being best man, though not apparently from being an MP, or, a little later, leader of the Liberal Party. Nineteen years after the royal wedding, Jeremy Thorpe was on trial for conspiracy to murder his former lover, Norman Scott.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
by Iain Martin
Published 11 Sep 2013

, ref 1 Yorkshire Bank, ref 1 Younger, George, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 becomes RBS chairman, ref 1 death of, ref 1, ref 2 and HSBC secret talks, ref 1 illness of, ref 1 and NatWest, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 and RBS hubris, ref 1 and Thatcher leadership campaign, ref 1, ref 2 Your Magazine, ref 1 List of Illustrations 1. A bust of William Paterson in the Bank of England, the institution he helped found before devising Scotland’s disastrous Darien scheme which led to the creation of The Royal Bank of Scotland in 1727. 2. Archibald Campbell, Earl of Ilay and the 3rd Duke of Argyll. The old Etonian aristocrat involved in the Treaty of Union became the Whig political master of Scotland and a founder of the Royal Bank. 3. The wily John Campbell, long-serving cashier of the Royal Bank who handed over the money Bonnie Prince Charlie needed to fund his invasion of England during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. 4.

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Clean-up operation: RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton and Goodwin’s successor as chief executive, Stephen Hester, face MPs at Westminster. 1. A bust of William Paterson in the Bank of England, the institution he helped found before devising Scotland’s disastrous Darien scheme which led to the creation of The Royal Bank of Scotland in 1727. 2. Archibald Campbell, Earl of Ilay and the 3rd Duke of Argyll. The old Etonian aristocrat involved in the Treaty of Union became the Whig political master of Scotland and a founder of the Royal Bank. 3. The wily John Campbell, long-serving cashier of the Royal Bank who handed over the money Bonnie Prince Charlie needed to fund his invasion of England during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. 4.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

“There thus developed in the Kennedy years a national accord on economic policy—a new consensus which gave hope of harnessing government, business and Labor in rational partnership for a steadily expanding American economy.”30 There was a clubbish feel to all this. In Britain, a Magic Circle of Old Etonians gathered around Bobbety Salisbury, the grandson of the great nineteenth-century prime minister, to choose the next Conservative Party leader (and thus usually prime minister). Eisenhower and Kennedy called on a cohort of Waspy “wise men,” typified by W. Averell Harriman, the son of a railway tycoon.

The Myth of the Blitz
by Angus Calder
Published 28 Jun 2012

At Ealing Broadway, when the All Clear sounded, some 200 people were seen pouring out of public shelters and ‘everyone looked calm and cheerful’ though obviously annoyed at interrupted journeys home. A middle-class man laughed and said: ‘Look at terrified Britain.’ Upper-class folk in Kensington told an old Etonian observer how they had reacted to the sirens. One young woman had felt compelled ‘to hand out brandies to everyone in the flat’; another had filled her handbag, at once, with cigarettes; a man’s reflex had been to take the whisky bottle off the table and put it on the floor. On the 16th, young Len England went to report for Mass-Observation on the damage in Croydon.

…

But it pioneers in giving a lively and positive character to the industrial workforce and its female members and in providing a voice (however unconvincing now) in the cinema to the north: Launder and Gilliatt’s Millions Like Us (1943), about ‘mobile women’ conscripted into ‘war industry’, is a weightier movie by far but probably owes something to Gracie’s precedent. Meanwhile, the conscience of intellectuals from the public-school and Oxbridge-educated professional classes had been stirred by the plight of the mysterious industrial north. Old Etonian George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier was by far his most successful book before Animal Farm; its documentary account of life in a coal-mining area played on the guilt of Left Book Club members. Likewise, Tom Harrisson, a Harrow-and-Cambridge product, returned from living on a South Sea Island with people whom he chose to present as ‘cannibals’ with the conviction that he was an ‘anthropologist’, and proceeded to Bolton, Lancashire, to dwell with the natives there and survey their strange customs.

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
by Stephen Fry
Published 27 Sep 2010

There had been one or two corruption scandals in the Crown Colony, and I think he rather fancied the image of himself as a kind of Serpico figure in sharply creased white shorts, a lone honest cop doing a dirty, dirty job … Emma, none of us doubted, would go out and achieve her destiny in world stardom. She already had an agent. A forbiddingly impressive figure called Richard Armitage, who drove a Bentley, smoked cigars and sported an old Etonian tie, had signed her on to the books of his company, Noel Gay Artists. He also represented Rowan Atkinson. Emma’s future was certain. None of which is to say that Hugh and I lacked ambition. We were ambitious in the peculiar negative mode in which we specialized: ambitious not to make fools of ourselves.

…

When it was time to propose the toast to Mummers and its next fifty years, he rose to his feet and, on the basis of those three or four scribbled words, delivered a thirty-five-minute speech in perfect Letter From America style. Michael Redgrave and I were most annoyed that women were not allowed to act in plays in Cambridge. We were tired of those pretty Etonians from King’s playing Ophelia. We thought the time had come to change all that. I went to the Mistresses of Girton and Newnham and proposed the formation of a serious new drama club in which women might be allowed to take on women’s roles. The Mistress of Girton was P. G. Wodehouse’s aunt, or cousin or something, I seem to remember, and she was terrifying but kind.

1946: The Making of the Modern World
by Victor Sebestyen
Published 30 Sep 2014

The Labour Government tried to take over the citadels of economic power – while the Conservatives, with a better understanding of reality, went quietly and without fuss to restore and recreate the environment in which they could begin to flourish again.’*15 * Smith was fired from the Government in May 1946 and stood down from Parliament at the same time. He was appointed chairman of the newly created West Midlands Coal Board. He was replaced as Minister of Food by the Old Etonian John Strachey, who had flirted with Marxism in the 1930s, but was by now mainstream Labour. Soon the placards were reading ‘Starve with Strachey’, which scans somewhat better. * At the same time Canada, which had also done well economically out of the war, agreed to lend Britain a much-needed £1,500 million on more favourable terms than America had offered.

…

To many Indian observers, there was something fitting about the principal envoy the British had despatched to negotiate away India. The colonial masters had habitually sent vigorous, decisive men, confident in their Civilising Mission, to run the Indian empire. Pethick-Lawrence, aged seventy-four, an old-Etonian Labour politician, was a ‘charming old gentleman, kindly’, if a ‘bit of a dodderer.’ Even his friends, of which, being a decent man, he had many, tended to call him ‘Pathetic-Lawrence’. He was best known for having been a passionate believer in women’s suffrage; he had once been arrested at a demonstration along with Emmeline Pankhurst, whom he had joined on hunger strike, and had himself been force-fed.

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms
by Iain Overton
Published 15 Apr 2015

The stand was manned by Patrick Hawes, the head of department of its modern sporting guns section, but he was too busy evaluating guns to talk to me. Robin Hawes, though, was able to talk. He was Patrick’s father and had the look of a charming Georgian parson, or an officer in the Crimean War. He had a trim figure, a strong, creased face and, beneath it all, a roguish glint. This raconteur was one of those special sort of old Etonians who never really grows up and who is universally liked. To me, he summed up the spine of the shooting classes and the heart of Middle England’s lower upper classes – a very specific niche which he personified perfectly. He was also clearly in love with the allure of guns and history. ‘It’s a fascinating subject,’ he said, ‘essentially a lot of “boy’s toys”.’

…

A fine hunting rifle is your ticket to transforming your dull life into those scenes you see in these black and white photos – back to a time of adventurers. When someone buys a Rigby they buy into that image, a key to that lifestyle. On a Friday night they can transform themselves into Denys Finch Hatton.’ Finch Hatton, an old Etonian and Oxford-educated aristocrat, was an interesting example to use. He was a big-game hunter, who, when on safari with the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was asked to creep up on a rhino and stick the king’s head – taking the form of postage stamps – on its bottom. He did so, one for each buttock.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

It is a university that proclaims the values of meritocratic excellence while providing a stage for the worst excesses of privilege, or where avowedly left-leaning professors carrying plastic bags of stale biscuits stolen from their common room spend endless hours helping yet another generation of Old Etonians replicate the wealth of their parents. Of all those who have tried to distil the essence of Oxford’s myth, few have come as close as the playwright Tom Stoppard. He arrived in London’s East End as Tomáš Sträussler, a Jewish child refugee from pre-war Czechoslovakia, and said he has spent much of his life since trying to be an ‘honorary Englishman’.

…

Eton College is the most notorious example, having educated more than a quarter of British prime ministers, almost all of whom went on to Oxford, by being based on not just exclusivity but the active exclusion of the rest of England. A glance at Eton’s list of sports fixtures, for instance, shows it only plays against other elite private schools.31 The whole purpose is to ensure Old Etonians get a better chance of achieving wealth and power than everyone else. When it opened a new £18 million debating chamber in 2015, one teacher said the absence of microphones was designed ‘to encourage boys to project their voices naturally and to command a chamber, as if it might be the House of Commons’.32 In fairness, access to Oxford University has widened in recent years with the proportion of places offered to products of private schools falling to below a third, much to the chagrin of parents who now complain their offspring face ‘reverse discrimination’.33 The ever-rising numbers of foreign students also enables the university to claim significantly higher levels of ethnic diversity.34 And, in 2019, almost exactly a century after Oxford first allowed women undergraduates, it achieved parity between male and female students.

Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham
by Mary S. Lovell
Published 1 Jan 1983

They travelled down by the twice-weekly train, with their horses. By the time she was eleven Beryl was already riding out on her father’s racehorses32 and had become an accomplished and competent horsewoman. On some of these trips south the pair would hunt with the Masara Hounds. Jim Elkington, a huge Old Etonian with a genial countenance and sparkling blue eyes, was the Master and huntsman of this pack of imported foxhounds, and both a good friend and a rival of Clutterbuck on Nairobi’s race course. The Elkington farm was a regular stop for Clutterbuck and Beryl when they came in from up country. The Elkington homestead was ‘complete with bleached and horned animal skulls lining the walls, a veranda ran all round the ramshackle wooden bungalow, littered with riding crops and bits of saddlery with dog bowls and…a huge population of dogs and cats, waiting to trip you up.’

…

With her quick, bright energy she had transformed the formerly gloomy residence, overfilled with heavy late-Victorian mahogany pieces, to a bright and comfortable, well-furnished home filled with light and flowers.35 The duke’s aide, Gray Phillips, was a close ally of the duchess and he also became a friend of Beryl during her stay in Nassau.36 Six and a half feet tall, the Old Etonian classics scholar was charming, resourceful and witty. A bachelor with a strong artistic streak, he was Beryl’s dinner partner on several occasions at Government House and elsewhere. The duchess’s dinners were said to be extremely amusing for she was very clever and funny and tried always to ensure that her guests were equally entertaining.37 By the end of June Beryl had sent four batches of typewritten manuscript to her publishers in Boston, totalling 110 pages.

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa
by Paul Kenyon
Published 1 Jan 2018

Borders were fluid at the time, but the Boer republic of Transvaal had the strongest claim. Britain’s Cape Colony lay twenty-five miles to the south. Its claim was so thin as to be non-existent, but its governor had an idea. Why didn’t they appoint an arbitrational court to settle the issue? The chairman would be Robert William Keate, an old Etonian who had played cricket for Oxford University and for England. The Transvaal Boers were right to be suspicious. It was a stitch-up. In 1871, Keate awarded the diamond fields to a local chief called Nicholas Waterboer, who had already secretly agreed to hand the territory to Queen Victoria. The British colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, arrived to celebrate, and instructed his underlings to anglicize the local place names so he could feel more at home.

…

His fury over their mistreatment, which his advisors put down to his fierce anti-racism, continued when he arrived at the office of the governor of Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, where Wilson later recalled, ‘On going in to harangue the governor, I was unable to see him because of the red flashes before my eyes.’3 That evening, as Sithole and Nkomo were driven back to their cells under darkening skies, Wilson found himself at a dinner in Salisbury being mocked by Smith’s ministers. Throughout the year-long negotiations, Smith had always presented himself as a relative moderate, reluctantly trying to accommodate the ill-mannered right-wingers in his party who were pushing him further to the right. Now Wilson got to see them for himself. One, the old Etonian Lord Graham, a minister in Smith’s government, told a lewd story and then illustrated it by belly-dancing and ‘brushing his capacious frame’ against Wilson’s face. The others were boorish and drunk, and taunted Wilson as he squirmed with discomfort. He finished the night feeling physically sick. In the circumstances, with such a momentous decision looming, their behaviour did not bode well.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

Jenkins was not alone. * Katz, by now barely 30 and with almost no editing experience, set himself up over the road in the Ray Street loft and started to assemble a team. They had no idea who they were looking for, or how much to pay them. One of the first through the door was Robin Houston, a 21-year-old Etonian, Oxford-educated computer scientist who had spent just one year as a web programmer and was, according to Katz, ‘the cleverest human being that ever walked through the Guardian’s doors’. He had one bag of clothes, long hair and brightly painted fingernails. Houston was originally hesitant about taking the job because he thought the Guardian was ‘too commercial’.

…

In the age of print-alone it was just about imaginable for one person to keep up with the news across all science and deliver three or four pieces a week. But the new beast had to be fed constantly, seven days a week. Science articles were well-read and appreciated.2 How did they see the role of the broadsheet over at the Telegraph, then being edited by Charles Moore, a libertarian Conservative Old Etonian who subsequently wrote a three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher? He and I did not see eye to eye on many political and social issues – and, from time to time, our two papers would snipe at each other. But at the heart of what we did there was a similar idea of what a serious newspaper’s job was in this age of peak broadsheet.

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939
by Virginia Nicholson
Published 27 Nov 2003

They became tramps or took off in caravans. Flamboyant and subversive, they read Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and Ann Veronica. They were trying out contraception, imagism and Post-Impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England as colonials, Etonians, peers and puritans was a parallel minority of moral pioneers, travelling third class and coping with faulty fireplaces. Often their idealistic experiments went disastrously wrong, and sometimes they felt cast adrift on the sea of new freedoms. And yet gradually, imperceptibly, they changed society.

…

Colum, Mary (1886–1957) Released from her Catholic school into the heart of Bohemian Dublin, this ‘lovely, saucy, bright student at University College’ was much influenced by the Irish Revival writers Yeats and Synge. She was also deeply involved in women’s suffrage. With her husband the poet Padraic Colum she helped found the Irish Review and became a friend of James Joyce. Connolly, Cyril (1903-1974) Etonian and Oxford graduate, Connolly vacillated between literary respectability and dissolute Bohemianism; his one novel, The Rock Pool (1947), describes Bohemian life on the Côte d’Azur. An ardent traveller and hedonist, his close friends included Patrick Balfour, Noel Blakiston and Peter Quennell, though as editor of Horizon he knew most of the major writers of his day.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

In 1942, however, the creation of a new category of flight crew in the new heavy bombers – the flight engineer – enabled him to both learn a trade and fly.56 The RAF began to gain a reputation as the most meritocratic of the services. The army soon followed suit, under the command of General Sir Ronald Forbes Adam. In June 1941 Adam became adjutant general of the army, with responsibility for personnel. An Old Etonian and graduate of the Royal Military Academy, he was an unlikely reformer. But he believed that the army must become meritocratic if it was to win the war. ‘The British Army is wasting its manpower’, he declared on his appointment. ‘The only way to obtain an efficient and contented army is to place the right man, as far as is humanly possible, in the right place.

…

But the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were in favour of significant disparities in wealth, and saw social mobility strategies as replacements for social policies that were designed to prevent or minimise poverty and inequality.34 In 2013 the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson – an Old Etonian who would become prime minister six years later – made the case for focusing on social mobility rather than narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. ‘[S]ome measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity’, he said.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

Before the First World War, the foreign branches of firms like Dunlop, Courtaulds, and Vickers reported their affairs when and where they wanted.8 The head offices of most British multinationals were not famed for their dynamism: witness Psmith in the City, P. G Wodehouse’s 1910 novel about a young Etonian trying to avoid hard work at the New Asiatic Bank, based on the author’s own brief stint at the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. The Germans were more systematic, if less adventurous. Germany also had plenty of overseas trading companies—or mercantile houses, as they were known. Yet, the typical German multinational was a successful domestic company that expanded abroad in search of markets and raw materials—first to Austria-Hungary and soon afterward to the United States, where German immigrants provided both willing customers and a ready-made network of contacts.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

The King and Queen came out on the balcony, looking enchanting. We all roared ourselves hoarse . . . I suppose this is the greatest day in our history.’ The iconography is understandably imperishable: of Churchill making the ‘V’ sign from a floodlit Ministry of Health balcony as the jubilant crowd below sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; of the Old Etonian trumpeter (and young Guards officer) Humphrey Lyttelton playing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ as he lurched on a handcart from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square and back followed by a long, swaying line of revellers doing the conga; of young women in confident groups on their own; of even the two princesses (Elizabeth and a 14-year-old Margaret Rose) being allowed to mingle with the crowds after midnight.

…

The storm died down only when the committee pointed out that all three had played on the course regularly during the war and that no permanent ‘change of policy’ was envisaged.3. There was also, as ever, the uncanny ability of ‘The Thing’ (as William Cobbett called the British establishment) to reinvent itself. Perhaps the prime example in these years was the National Trust, almost entirely run by Old Etonians. Historically, the Trust’s prime purpose had been to preserve actually or potentially threatened tracts of countryside, but that now changed to the acquisition and upkeep of country houses which would otherwise probably have been demolished. Public access to the nation’s new treasures was in some instances fixed at no more than 50 days in the year and at hours which were, as the Trust freely admitted in 1947, ‘settled as far as possible to suit the donor’s convenience’.

…

Warburg did not know precisely how London was going to escape from being permanently condemned to an existence as a rather insular, largely domestic financial centre, but he did know that somehow it had to be done, preferably with his own merchant bank in the vanguard. The other person with a visionary streak was George Bolton, a talented, restless banker who had come up on the Bank of England’s international side but lacked the social poise and indeed breeding of his main rival Cameron (‘Kim’) Cobbold, the latter becoming Governor in 1949. ‘A pleasant Etonian’ was how Raymond Streat the next year described the City’s new head. ‘Able and adequate, but not tremendous.’ Soon afterwards, Hugh Gaitskell was less polite: ‘I must say that I have a very poor opinion of him – he is simply not a very intelligent man.’8. In fact it was easy to underestimate Cobbold, who though certainly no intellectual was a pretty capable operator and had the great gubernatorial virtue of not getting flustered by events.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Anything is better than the status quo. Those ‘who own nothing’, to use Davies’s terms, have, as Mann says, ‘nothing to lose’.17 The wonder, rather, is that the UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, having described the EU membership referendum as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change’, has, for all his impeccable Etonian and Oxbridge establishment credentials, managed to persuade people that support for him, as for Brexit, represents opposition to the establishment and the status quo – all the while that Jeremy Corbyn, the politician offering real change and Johnson’s vanquished rival in the 2019 general election, has been pilloried in Leave-voting regions as a representative of the ‘metropolitan elite’ liberal establishment.

…

The fact that the political mainstream in the UK has, in recent years, rediscovered industrial policy is probably a positive signal in this regard, although the Financial Times is absolutely right to warn against ‘manufacturing fetishism’.32 (The idea that only manufacturing represents ‘real’ economic activity producing outputs with ‘real’ value is a longstanding economic misconception, attributable to, among others, Adam Smith – and effectively debunked by, among others, Karl Marx.)33 There are still plenty of commentators on the Right, as well as in mainstream economics, who insist that the government should stay out of such matters, leaving investment choices entirely to ‘the market’. The old Etonian Nick Macpherson’s recent rant about the UK’s history of ‘government largesse’, ‘interventionist failures’ and ill-conceived ‘sectoral strategies and subsidies’ is just one example, albeit a particularly extreme one.34 However, as more informed observers have pointed out, the idea that industrial policy is a strict ‘binary choice between laissez-faire policies and “picking winners” ’ is a thoroughly outdated one.35 The debate has moved on.

Misogynies
by Joan Smith
Published 10 Mar 1992

The following day the Sun ran a front-page article repeating the story in the form of a denial, quoting the protest of Lady Tryon’s husband: ‘MY WIFE’S NOT PRINCE CHARLES’S LOVER’.13 One newspaper broke with tradition by publishing an unflattering cartoon which portrayed Diana as a sharp-chinned shrew. Others dropped clear hints about Diana’s ‘infidelity’, printing pictures of an Old Etonian banker who had apparently escorted her to various functions. Unlike Fergie, Diana was not going to be allowed to get away with even an imaginary affair; sexual inexperience, except with her husband, is the hallmark of the child-bride, and the development marked the ultimate step in Diana’s fall from grace, the final detail needed to demonstrate her miserable failure to conform to the behaviour everyone had a right to expect of her.

The Making of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 16 May 2007

Churchill, Tories and Gold If there is one man who symbolizes British capitalism in these years, it is the theatrical, bearded guru of high finance, Sir Montagu Norman, whose governorship of the Bank of England ran from 1920 to 1944. Norman looked more like a raffish painter than a banker. He liked to wear a cloak, travel incognito and, interested in spiritualism, apparently told a colleague he could walk through walls. Superbly connected across the old City of families of merchant bankers and Old Etonian stockbrokers, Norman awed Britain’s politicians (whom he detested). Described by other bankers as being charming, feminine, vain, unstable and prone to nervous breakdowns, Norman was, however, a steely and dominant figure. For much of this period he kept the Treasury at arm’s length and boasted to parliamentarians who had the cheek to question his judgement that he operated by instinct, not facts.

…

Malcolm Campbell was a huge hero between the wars, his chiselled, long-chinned face familiar across Europe and America, appearing on German postcards, recorded in Tintin drawings and advertising everything from motor oil to American cigarettes. He took the world land speed record for the first time in 1924 on Pendine Sands in Wales driving a Sunbeam, then partly designed his own Campbell-Napier Blue Bird, winning it again in 1927. Enter, on a Florida beach, his great rival Henry Segrave, another boy’s own heroic type, an Etonian who had fought in the war as a machine gunner and then a fighter pilot, being badly wounded twice. The first Briton to win a Grand Prix race in a British car, Segrave had decided to also become the first man to travel on land at more than 200 m.p.h. Much mocked for boasting about the impossible, he achieved it in March 1927 in his Mystery Sunbeam.

Respectable: The Experience of Class
by Lynsey Hanley
Published 20 Apr 2016

The music journalist Simon Price highlighted the fact that, at one point in 2011, seven of the top ten British albums were by performers who had been privately educated. Countless major British artists, including Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine (Alleyn’s School), Lily Allen (Bedales), Frank Turner (an old Etonian), Mumford and Sons (King’s College School) and Chris Martin of Coldplay (Sherborne), attended elite public schools, apparently showing that the limited meritocracy of the grammar, technical and art schools has been reversed by an expression of cast-iron confidence inculcated through private education.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

The prime minister instead chose to shoot the messenger. He dropped ominous hints that charges could follow if the Guardian carried on publishing. In a speech in Brussels, Cameron said that he couldn’t afford to take a ‘la-di-da, airy-fairy’ view of the work of the intelligence services, a dangerous choice of words for an old Etonian. Cameron dodged awkward questions about whether Britain was complicit in the bugging of Angela Merkel’s phone. A previously obscure Tory MP, Julian Smith, suggested the paper had compromised the identities of British agents (it hadn’t) and ‘stands guilty potentially of treasonous behaviour’. Smith’s campaign would have had more credibility were it not for a gaffe of his own.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
by James Meek
Published 18 Aug 2014

Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is, as I write, Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, and until 2012 remained in government under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his son-in-law George Osborne.) The 1979 Conservative manifesto barely mentioned privatisation, or denationalisation, as it was sometimes called. In 1968, when an internal party think tank called the public sector of industry ‘a millstone round our necks’ and proposed some sell-offs, Thatcher – who had been researching the privatisation of power stations and failed to find ‘acceptable answers’ – was sceptical.

Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper
by Andrew Martin
Published 9 Feb 2017

If it really was true that the sleeping car conductors were fluent in three languages and conversant in half a dozen, then the average Englishman, fluent in one (and not even that after a few drinks), might easily feel intimidated. It might be thought that Sleeping Car to Trieste had been written by some gauche person who’d suffered social embarrassments on the Wagons-Lits, but the scriptwriter was William Douglas-Home, an old Etonian who’d also attended Sandhurst and Oxford and whose older brother, Alec Douglas-Home, became Prime Minister in 1963. Dinner eaten, the choice was between the bleakness of the dining car (because the Texans had left and no one else had come) and the bleakness of my compartment. I ordered half a bottle of white wine to ‘take away’, and asked for the bill, which came to a reasonable twenty-five euros.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek
Published 5 Mar 2019

Farmer-conservationists like Wright have moved a long way from their old mindset, but according to some radical farmers, when global warming is the peril, they haven’t moved nearly far enough. One such was Peter Melchett, the former head of Greenpeace UK, who owned the 890-acre Courtyard Farm in northwest Norfolk, near Hunstanton. He was also a hereditary peer, also an Etonian, also in receipt of a six-figure subsidy (£107,545 last year). But he was the only member of the Norfolk farming aristocracy to have spent two nights in a Norwich jail, in 2000, for attempting to purge a local farmer’s field of an experimental crop of GM maize.* Like Wright, Melchett was a farmer–conservationist, and rewarded for it by the subsidy system.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-Racist Comedian
by Frankie Boyle
Published 23 Oct 2013

They were promoting the UK, although they missed the chance to use the slogan, ‘Never a better time to visit . . . as right now we’re not there.’ They toured New York on a double-decker bus, allegedly the first time since last year’s trip to Vegas Harry had heard someone shout, ‘Room for one more on top!’ Presumably, the idea of sending over a prince and a millionaire Etonian to try to persuade US businesses to invest in the UK was to make them think they can slash labour costs as we’ve still got feudalism. The Prime Minister announced Britain has clinched a deal with a US drugs giant to become a global test site for medicines. A global test site for medicines? That sounds pretty sinister.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
by Liaquat Ahamed
Published 22 Jan 2009

No government seemed capable of doing it and he thought—a little grandiosely—that his guild could somehow fill the vacuum left by politicians. He liked to envisage himself and the other members of his small brotherhood as elite tribunes, standing above the fray of politics, national resentments, and amateur nostrums. Though Norman “delighted in appearing unconventional,” his views about society were very much “those of an old Etonian.” Still an Edwardian, he clung to the belief in aristocratic government. In March 1922, he wrote to Strong in that elliptical way of his, “Only lately have the countries of the world started to clear up after the war, two years having been wasted in building castles in the air and pulling them down again.

…

Indeed, while wholesale prices in the rest of the world would continue to fall, dropping 10 percent over the next year, in Britain deflation came to an end—prices over the next year even rose a modest 2 percent. The one group who received a big shock was the small number of British people traveling abroad. Time magazine recounted how one man in an Old Etonian tie was sufficiently incensed at being offered only $3 for his pounds in New York—a “hold-up,” he called it—that he stormed off muttering, “A pound is still a pound in England. I shall carry my pounds home with me.” The recriminations began almost immediately. Snowden in his speech to the Commons on September 20 blamed the debacle on the gold policies of the United States and France.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

The organization of power is the only thing that matters today: ‘Ideology has no importance here’ (Deleuze, 2004: 263). However, shall we press Deleuze a little on this observation? On one level he is correct. The current catastrophe we call ‘society’ has little reliance on rather over-contrived representations that might cloak the domination of the many by a minute and slightly retarded Etonian or Skull and Bones few. Power doesn’t care what you think about it. What we earlier called ‘“Fuck you!” capitalism’ denotes a profound hostility that is proudly displayed by corporations and the neoliberal state towards the 99.8 per cent. But Deleuze is incorrect when he argues that such openness has nothing to do with ideology.

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit
by William Keegan
Published 24 Jan 2019

I think the answer may lie in that familiar British aristocratic or upper-middle-class assumption – mainly among the male of the species – of ‘effortless superiority’. So far in his life, David Cameron had had an easy ride. He had risen almost effortlessly to the top, and there was much talk among those who knew him well of ‘that Etonian self-confidence’. Moreover, the Scottish referendum, after a few nervous moments, had gone well for a Prime Minister who was leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. During his mission to extract concessions from Brussels and the rest of the EU, he gave the impression to his counterparts of being overconfident that he could pull it off.

Voyage for Madmen
by Peter Nichols
Published 1 May 2011

This was the classic POSH route taken by the Empire builders of the British raj, so called because the favoured, more expensive cabins were on the shaded side of the ship: port side going out, starboard coming home. But probably no place the young seaman sailed to preserved this vanishing world as authentically as aboard the insular, tradition-steeped ships of the British Merchant Marine, which produced sailors and officers as hidebound in their ways as Old Etonians. It was a tough, exacting, nineteenth-century British seaman’s training. While stationed in Bombay, Knox-Johnston and a fellow officer decided to commission a local Indian boatyard to build them a yacht. They sent away to a design office in England for the plans of a sleek ketch they had seen in a yachting magazine, but what came back in the mail was a much older, slower design, a tubby, bluff-bowed double-ender, drawn by American yacht designer William Atkin in 1924 for Motor Boat magazine.

Perfect Sound Whatever
by James. Acaster
Published 21 Aug 2019

I was scared when he started shouting at me, I was so scared that ‘fucking off to Poland’ actually seemed rather appealing. He circled round and started shouting more xenophobia in my face so I replied in the most English voice I’ve ever spoken in. ‘Whatever do you mean?’ I queried with the voice of an Etonian prefect. When he heard my English accent he was absolutely stunned: ‘WHAT?! YOU’RE ENGLISH?! WHY’D YOU WALK INTO ME?! AREN’T YOU A PATRIOT?! WE WON THE FOOTBALL TODAY!!!!!’ Oh yes, I’m sorry, if I was a true patriot I would’ve been walking through one of London’s main rail stations, smashing my body into strangers while holding both middle fingers high in the air, and when you and I crossed paths we could’ve linked our extended middle fingers and spun round in a traditional maypole dance while somebody filmed it before emailing the footage to her Majesty herself and cc-ing in Nigel Farage.

Rich and Pretty: A Novel
by Rumaan Alam
Published 6 Jun 2016

She’s known Amina since high school, not particularly well, but in that school, in that circle, even simple acquaintance came with a certain intimacy, one that could last for years. It wouldn’t have been perceived as a breach had Lauren called Amina, after years of their not having spoken, to ask a favor. “It’s beautiful, my God,” Amina is saying, peering out of the tinted windows. She speaks with the oddest of accents, Amina does, a cocktail: her father’s Etonian English mellowed by her mother’s distinguished Dhundari, to say nothing of the parade of schoolteachers who conducted her education in American schools the world over—first Istanbul, later Berne, then Addis Ababa, finally New York. She came to the States at ten; indeed, it was from Amina that Lauren assumed the role of “new girl” in sixth grade.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

For the elected insiders, the struggles with purity of conviction are constant. Cameron’s tiny space on the political stage was emblematic. Farage could say what he liked about Europe, and did so, most days of the year. Cameron was in a coalition with the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, while leading a party with lots of MPs who agreed with Farage. Cameron might have had Old Etonian self-confidence, but that was not enough to free him from the incarcerations of power. The traps became more dangerous following the financial crash in 2008. Mainstream parties on the left became part of coalitions that were imposing spending cuts. Mainstream parties on the right had to accommodate the supposedly opposing views of their partners on the left.

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers
by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Published 14 May 2020

They included the former emir of Qatar and, of equal note, a wealthy, well-known rabble-rouser—a half-Iranian Iranian nationalist from the UK named Darius Guppy. Guppy, like Michael Bagley, had been caught in elaborate illegal schemes to raise money for unclear purposes, and had once conspired with his friend and fellow Old Etonian British prime minister Boris Johnson to have a journalist physically beaten. Those were the connections that had so worried the anti-fascist activist who had helped me investigate this Londoner, for the information outlined the possibility that Jason had been contacted by someone with channels to power.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

They grasped that in order to wield lasting power it was important to make sure their efforts appeared as non-political as possible. Unfailingly, whenever confronted with a choice between overt political engagement and more surreptitious political lobbying, Hayek would recommend the second strategy. Shortly after the Second World War, Hayek cautioned Antony Fisher, an Old Etonian who would earn a fortune introducing factory poultry production in Britain, against a career in politics, suggesting that positive reform would be impossible without ‘first effecting a change in the climate of ideas’.5 Hayek urged Fisher to establish a ‘scholarly research organization’ that would supply intellectuals in the academy and journalism with studies of the free market and its application to current affairs.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

Kansas has created a post called “the Repealer” to get rid of red tape and pays a “bounty” to high schools for every vocational qualification their students earn in certain fields. Forty-five states are developing new curriculums, thirty-eight have introduced a performance element in teachers’ pay, and forty-two allow charter schools. The list could go on. Change is even coming to the country that was at the center of our three and a half revolutions. An old Etonian pragmatist, stuck in an unwieldy coalition, might seem an unlikely radical, but David Cameron is on course to reverse Gordon Brown’s spending splurge by 2015, reducing public spending to below 40 percent of the GDP, roughly where Margaret Thatcher left it in 1990. Mr. Cameron has engendered far less opposition than Thatcher largely because most of the savings have been found in a nonideological way—through freezing pay, getting councils to share facilities, buying fewer police cars, and so on.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

As he’d been editor of the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and also the Spectator, it was important I did not miss this meeting. Once I’d entered the bustling café on London’s Piccadilly, breathless and just on time, I immediately spotted my interviewee sitting serene and upright at a table in a far corner. Charles Moore rose to greet me, immaculately dressed in an English three-piece suit; an attire fitting the assured Etonian accent with which he asked whether I’d prefer tea or coffee. I had wanted to talk to Moore for some time now, as I knew his expertise perhaps eclipsed that of most others on the subject of our interview: the life and person of Margaret Thatcher. Having spent many years writing and publishing the first two volumes of Thatcher’s official biography (a combined tome of over fifteen hundred pages), he was now busily working on the final part of his trilogy, a task he’d been engaged with that very afternoon.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

They were like the Royal Irish Constabulary, an armed gendarmerie with a distinct officer corps. In Asia and Africa they had white officers at the head, and local, or non-local, usually non-white, constables and other lower ranks. Officers were a distinct cadre, recruited after public school, trained in special schools and put into positions of command. Eric Blair, an Etonian, served seven years in the imperial Indian Police, stationed in Burma – he returned to Britain and became the writer George Orwell. It would have been unthinkable for him to have joined a domestic police force, though had he stayed in the Indian Police he might have returned home to become a chief constable.

…

Macmillan was succeeded by a fully titled aristocrat, the 14th Earl of Home, or Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he became on renouncing his peerage. The ministers in Conservative governments of the 1950s and early 1960s were overwhelmingly public school and Oxbridge educated. Around one-sixth were aristocrats, and fully one-third Etonians.9 The Labour Party, excepting a small part of its leadership, was very different. Those with secondary and university education had, as in the case of the Tories, tended to have been to public schools and Oxbridge. Where Labour differed was that part of its front bench (and most of its MPs), had no secondary or university education.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

‘He’s more interested in what animal he’s going to shoot, or what claret he’s going to have for lunch, or where he’s going to shag Sam next! He’s not a political obsessive, which is one of his great strengths.’ When the former Israeli premier Shimon Peres died in October 2016, Cameron found himself on the same plane as Boris Johnson, his nemesis in the referendum campaign. The two Old Etonians made up over a scotch at the King David Hotel. Johnson told a friend later, ‘He’s a guy who feels he was doing a bloody good job as prime minister and then suddenly he wasn’t allowed to be prime minister any more. He’s pissed off. You can’t blame him.’ Yet as 2017 went on, the Cameroon set grew concerned about their leader, who was easily bored, confiding that he was becoming depressed by the implications of Brexit and the state of his life.

…

He knew he would be the one blamed by the public if things went wrong, but throughout the summer he had watched as Hammond asserted his influence and Davis had his high-profile meetings with Barnier. The phrase that was increasingly used by MPs in the House of Commons tea room was that Johnson was ‘a busted flush’. Over the summer he had even been eclipsed by his fellow Old Etonian, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who had been hailed as a leadership contender by ‘Moggmentum’ online activists. Boris’s one attempt to insert himself into the Brexit debate – telling the EU to ‘whistle for it’ on the money – had been seen as a gaffe which confirmed his lack of seriousness. Had Johnson had a better year, he might have seemed the inevitable choice to replace May after the general election.

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War
by Giles Tremlett
Published 14 Oct 2020

Khenkin was sent to enrol in the Brigades and later joined a guerrilla detachment, together with a Spaniard called Ramón Mercader. The latter would become famous as Trotsky’s assassin, killing him with a blow from an ice pick in an operation organised by Eitingon in Mexico City in August 1940. One of the NKVD’s first International Brigade recruits was, like the old Etonian Orwell, a British public school-educated leftist, David Crook. Also like Orwell, whose The Road to Wigan Pier had been published while the writer was in Spain, Crook, a Jewish Londoner, had been shocked by his contact with poverty – in this case, while studying at Columbia University in New York, in the city’s Bowery flophouses and on trips to visit striking Kentucky coalminers.

…

Chipped and weathered, the knee-high memorial bore the names of thirty-five volunteers from XV Brigade – including men who had travelled from the United States, Canada, Britain, Palestine, Finland, Latvia and the nearby Spanish province of Valencia. Amongst the names of those commemorated on the memorial were former Lincoln Battalion commander Bob Merriman and the old Etonian Olympic rower Lewis Clive. At the time of its rediscovery, this was the only surviving 1930s monument to the International Brigades in Spain – though a dozen more have been erected since Franco’s death. Hundreds of other memorials can be found spread across the world, from Seattle to Stockholm and as far east as the Volga river town of Samara.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran
Published 2 Aug 2021

The men of high place in the state came, McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Robert McNamara, Paul Nitze; the spies came, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Dickie Bissell; the wits, or those who passed for such, came, Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Phil Graham; the grandes dames came, Bunny Mellon, Kay Graham, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who was Joe’s cousin. Even the traitors came, among them Guy Burgess, the once charming madcap, a sort of Etonian dervish, now bloated and filthy, his powers of mind lost in a drunken ruin. Joe asked him to leave when he began to traduce the American Republic. The wine was first rate. Joe preferred Bordeaux vintages, and he was partial to his friend Alain de Rothschild’s Château Lafite. The caviar aux blinis and the terrapin soup were as good; and the exotic garden and the belligerent toucan (it once spat its food out on Bob McNamara’s bald spot) were complimented by a comical butler, José, whose services became, during the course of an evening, entertaining in their own right as he consumed the heeltaps left in discarded glasses.

…

The way we live now, Santayana pointed out, conspires against it.VII But probably nowhere does it flourish more intensely than in a boarding school, where the ordinary ties of domestic intimacy have been cut, or artificially suspended; the relation with the best friend bears the whole of an emotional weight that in ordinary cases is more equably distributed, is borne alike by mothers and fathers, by sisters and brothers and the family dog. There must have been a certain amount of suppressed erotic feeling in these Platonic couplings. But at Groton the relationships were not sexual, as jailhouse hitchings, or as Etonian and Harrovian betrothals, are said to be. Rob early became infatuated with a delicately featured girl whose eyes, as ingenuously blue as Mr. Gardner’s, contrasted agreeably with her dark hair. His passion, unabated and unrequited, for Cynthia, as I shall call her, was protracted until the end of his school days, when it became even more completely hopeless; for in sixth form Cynthia fell in love with Blagden.VIII One day, not long after Cynthia and Blagden began to go out, the conversation at the lunch table turned to sex.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

As the game grew in popularity and became a fixture in the English sporting calendar, it became part of Indian life, too. The Calcutta Cricket Club was founded in 1792, on the site of the present-day Eden Gardens stadium, more or less contemporaneously with the MCC, a matter of some dispute. The first match there was played between Old Etonians and The Rest of Calcutta. Elsewhere in the empire, the game was exported by English public schoolboys turned youthful imperialists. In South Africa, for example, the game was essentially a white man’s recreation. Clubs were formed in Pietermaritzburg, Bloemfontein, Kimberley, Pretoria and Johannesburg, but almost exclusively for the ruling class.

The English
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 29 Jan 2013

And if it really was possible fifty or a hundred years ago to discern something of an Englishman from his facial and body appearance, it was much more likely to be a deduction about social class than anything else. The wealthy ate well and prospered. The poor ate badly and it showed. That thin Old Etonian George Orwell remarked, with the sort of sweeping condescension of which only someone of his background was capable, that ‘the prevailing physical type does not agree with the caricatures, for the tall, lanky physique which is traditionally English is almost confined to upper classes: the working people, as a rule, are rather small, with short limbs and brisk movements, and with a tendency among the women to grow dumpy in early middle life’.22 (This is getting dangerously close to the John Glashan cartoon in which two well-dressed women pass a group of workmen digging a hole in the ground.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
by A. N. Wilson
Published 3 Jun 2020

Now he rattled along to Charing Cross in his coffin. When it arrived at the terminus, it was carried into a hearse and three carriages followed, not the two the family had originally specified as a maximum. In the first were the four children who were still alive and still in England – Charley, Old Etonian and failed businessman, at present making a mess of editing Household Words; Harry the barrister; Mamie; and Katey Collins, who would one day be the person who revealed Dickens’s Secret Life to the world. In the next carriage was the purveyor of the official version, biographer John Forster, who had known Dickens since the Doughty Street days, the early triumphant Pickwickian days; he shared the carriage with Charley’s wife; with Georgy, who had also been with Dickens ever since the days of Doughty Street and had been his companion to the very last; and with his sister Letitia, four years Charles’s junior, who had been a little child when their father was taken into the Marshalsea, but whose eyes had seen it all: the hilarity of the aunts and the parents clapping and laughing as the infant Charles entertained them with songs and imitations; the ignominy of her twelve-year-old brother setting out to Warren’s Blacking warehouse; the success of Boz; the holidays in Broadstairs when she and her husband stayed with Charles as he laboured on Barnaby Rudge; and later holidays on the Isle of Wight, when, at Lady Swinburne’s house at Bonchurch, the company had screamed with excitement at Dickens’s skill as a conjuror, and Lady Swinburne’s strange flame-headed little boy, with an enormous head, Algernon Charles, had clapped and cheered.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

The suggestion that, elsewhere in the house, there might be another room where, on a more important occasion, one might also eat. The deft swerve around the words “dinner party” (these, being aspirational middle class, are presumably non-U16 in Maude-ian circles) and “meal” (also non-U, though I’ve no idea why; I’m only aware of this at all because a horrible old Etonian I once met ticked me off when it fell sluttishly from my lips).17 Similarly, saying one went to a “small school in Cambridge” when everyone knows you mean Harvard suggests the downplaying of something that is actually prized and rare, just like the option to have dinner in the dining room or the kitchen.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

His crowing glee at the sight of a passing bandwagon, the intense joy because his opponents have messed up, and so he’s closer to his aims without having to do anything good, made me want to puke. And every time a Labour politician says “out of touch”, I want to scream, which is difficult to do if you’re already puking. I can’t shake the feeling that someone in Miliband’s team thinks it’s unbelievably clever that they keep repeating that phrase, basically as a synonym for “Old Etonian”, and I want that person’s feeling of cleverness to be ripped out of them without anaesthetic. Politicians just can’t win with people like me. But then they appear to have stopped trying to win and to be willing to settle for losing least – which, as David Cameron can attest, brings with it the same job title.

Step by Step the Life in My Journeys
by Simon Reeve
Published 15 Aug 2019

Yes, of course we dip into our own pockets, and our money goes a lot further abroad when given directly to somebody in need. But it is always a sticking plaster. We left Dushanbe and drove south, guided by Noor and with a Mr Bean fan behind the wheel who told us in broken English his name was Jackie Chan. We met a twenty-two-year-old ex-Etonian called Wills who runs his Canadian father’s gold mine, one of the tiny number of Westerners trying to make money in what was effectively a laid-back Wild West. Then, on a dusty, potholed highway which served as a main road across the country, we spotted one of the beezneez elite driving with bodyguards in a brand-new, top-of-the-range white Jaguar.

The Railways: Nation, Network and People
by Simon Bradley
Published 23 Sep 2015

As Robert Audley mused in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), ‘The Company may make as many bye-laws as they please … but I shall take the liberty of enjoying my cheroot as long as I’ve half-a-crown left to give the guard.’ Or you could take the rap and pay up: another Punch cartoon from these years has a ‘fast Etonian’ rebuked by a stove-pipe-hatted figure who reveals himself to be the manager of the line, only to receive the cool reply, ‘Well, old boy, I must have my smoke, so you may as well take your forty shillings now.’ The young Prince of Wales himself was detected in the offence, according to society gossip in the 1860s.

…

p. 108 ‘railway pipes’; covered in scratches: Quick, 169, 171–2. p. 108 nearly £30,000 of share capital: Alford, 87–8. p. 108 first-class saloon of 1846: ILN, 12 Sept. 1846. p. 108 Eastern Counties: Paar and Grey, 71. p. 109 two unchivalrous male passengers: PIP, 7 June 1862. p. 109 cartoon of 1858: Punch, 23 Oct. 1858. p. 109 ‘fast Etonian’: Punch, 28 Sept. 1861. p. 109 The young Prince of Wales: Ellis, C. H. 6, 35. p. 109 Huddersfield magistrates: Harris, 49. p. 109 John Stuart Mill: Hansard 193, 24 July 1868, col. 1736. p. 109 By October 1868: RW, Jan. 1969, 38. p. 110 Judy magazine: Judy, 2 Dec. 1868. p. 110 Great Western smoking compartment: Kilvert, iii, 159.

Lost at Sea
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Oct 2012

But imperceptibly, gracefully, Nicky is leading us there. We have a few hours off. We swim and play basketball. The crowd is, as always, mainly white and wealthy. A criticism leveled at Nicky by other Anglicans is that Jesus cast his net wide to embrace poor fishermen, whereas Nicky seems to concentrate on rich widows, Old Etonians, and young highfliers. This annoys him, far more than the accusations that he is a cult leader. He points out a group of men on the edge of the basketball court. They lean against a picket fence, watching the game with an inscrutable vigilance, huge and tanned, like a prison gang during their hour in the yard.

Flame Trees of Thika
by Elspeth Huxley
Published 15 Dec 1998

If you went on long enough you would come to mountains and forests no one had mapped and tribes whose languages no one could understand. We were not going as far as that, only two days’ journey in the ox-cart to a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie. While everyone else strode about Nairobi’s dusty cart-tracks in bush shirts and khaki shorts or riding breeches, Roger Stilbeck was always neatly dressed in a light worsted suit of perfect cut, and wore gold cuff-links and dark brogue shoes. No bishop could have appeared more respectable, and his wife, who looked very elegant, was said to be related to the Duke of Montrose.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Labour could not admit several of these had worsened and others improved only marginally, and never tried to explain that these were symptoms of Britain’s abiding inequality. The parties came together to deplore low rates of social mobility, but Labour’s political failure lay in allowing a Cameron cabinet stuffed full of Old Etonians and Old Westminsters to sound remotely plausible on the subject, even as it strove to increase educational selection and diminish the weak powers Labour had given the Charity Commission to investigate the ‘social benefit’ of the public schools. Under Labour no plates had shifted in Britain’s social geology.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
by David Bellos
Published 10 Oct 2011

In the musical My Fair Lady, based on G. B. Shaw’s stage play Pygmalion, which itself rewrites a far more ancient myth, Professor Higgins asks, “Oh! why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” We must answer, Oh! but they do, Professor Higgins. They teach them to declare themselves to be Geordies and Aberdonians, Etonians and lads on the Clapham omnibus, ladies from Morningside or fishermen from Newquay. If you are British, you just can’t not notice. Alongside its role as a planetary interlanguage in print, English speech—like any other—is a highly pixelated way of telling people who you are. That is something that all forms of human speech share, and it is perhaps the only thing that is truly universal about language.

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There
by Sinclair McKay
Published 24 May 2010

There was Charles Buckingham, erudite curator from the British Museum who wore a private’s uniform … there was Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe Park, who was a civilian recruited straight from school, there was a very unglossy university-educated North Midlands second lieutenant who shared a civilian billet with me, there was a sophisticated Etonian other rank who lived in Sloane Street, and about ten others I cannot remember distinctly.4 As Jenkins recalled in an interview: ‘You could spend nights in which you got nowhere at all. You didn’t get a single break, you just tried, played around through this long bleak night with total frustration and your brain was literally raw.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2008

He loved the fact that the more distant hills rising out of the Gobi were called the Cinnabar Mountains, and he thought the whole conjunction—of names, weather, and great antiquity—was vastly impressive. He thought this even more when he crossed a cwm called Black Crow Sand Pass, raced down the slope on the far side to the nondescript village of Anyuan, lunched at a nearby mission, and discovered that its abbot was from England and, moreover, an Old Etonian. Only later that night, when the truck broke down yet again and he had to spend the night in a truckers’ rest stop, did his equanimity falter: his night, he said “was like sleeping in a public lavatory with cocks crowing under the bed.” Northwestward the scenery became harsher, more desertlike. Soon there were camels.

Operation Chastise: The RAF's Most Brilliant Attack of World War II
by Max Hastings
Published 18 Feb 2020

Indeed, they had a rueful pre-war joke that a flier would sooner tell people he was a pianist in a brothel than admit to being a member of the RAF. Even after hostilities began, while many British aristocrats enlisted in the army and some in the Royal Navy, very few became pilots. The aircrew of 617 Squadron eventually included several public schoolboys and one Etonian, but none were authentic ‘toffs’. In Gibson’s case, after a few months the RAF relented and accepted him for pilot training. This was indisputably exciting, but also perilous: during the inter-war years sixty-two cadets at Cranwell, the service’s elite college, were killed in flying accidents. In November 1936, aged just eighteen, three months after leaving St Edward’s, Gibson reported for instruction to the airfield at Yatesbury in Wiltshire.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

The British establishment also embraced the bean-counting veterans of the crisis. KPMG’s senior UK partner until 2006, and thereafter European leader, while it audited HBOS, Bradford & Bingley and the Co-operative Bank, was John Griffith-Jones. In 2012, Chancellor George Osborne rewarded the Old Etonian with the chairmanship of Britain’s new financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority. Somewhat embarrassingly, Griffith-Jones was repeatedly forced to leave the boardroom when the scandals that broke on his bean-counting watch at KPMG were discussed. More recently, when KPMG came to elect a new British chairman in 2017, its partners chose Bill Michael.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Turned out that Bernard Arnault, the head of the global luxury conglomerate LVMH, thought so, too, as did the Italian retailer Benetton. Malmsten and Leander’s Boo.com quickly raised three large rounds of capital, opened offices on Carnaby Street, and launched simultaneously in seven countries.5 Another good-looking and posh pair, Old Etonian Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, the daughter of an Oxford historian, started Lastminute.com, a successful travel site that specialized in great deals on eleventh-hour vacations. They eventually took the company public in a £577 million listing.6 Even First Tuesday itself was eventually sold for roughly $50 million.7 Meyer, to her great credit, admitted that First Tuesday had been “in the right place, at the right time.”

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939
by Adrian Tinniswood
Published 2 May 2016

Honor Channon, on the other hand, said it reminded her of a Spanish brothel.7 Her husband, Chips, the American-born British politician, was mesmerized by its oddness, describing it as “a triumph of beautiful bad taste and Babylonian luxury, with terrace and flowery gardens, and jade green pools and swimming baths and rooms done up in silver and blue and orange.”8 Max Beerbohm called it an “extraordinary elaboration of Persian fantasy, controlled by Etonian good taste.”9 Glyn Philpot decorated the dining room with a frieze of white bullocks and naked black Egyptians against a chocolate-brown ground; the walls were paneled with lapis lazuli, “a living wall of moving colour” beneath a ceiling of opalescent pink. The dining chairs and table were gilded.

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

We needed a break, and we got it when our wonderful local Wiltshire MP Richard Needham turned up out of the blue at the Chippenham factory. He happened to be the energetic Minister of State for Trade in John Major’s government. I started to tell the minister all the things that were wrong about politics, when he suddenly said, “Shut the fuck up, Dyson. What’s your turnover?” Refreshing for an Old Etonian and government minister. “About £3.5 [almost $5] million,” I said. He responded, “I want it up to £50 [almost $70] million within twelve months. What help do you need?” I explained the problems we were having with the mass-market retail trade. Needham arranged for Geoffrey Howe, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Deputy Prime Minister, to visit.

Jerusalem: The Biography
by Simon Sebag-Montefiore
Published 27 Jan 2011

CAPTAIN MONTY PARKER AND THE ARK OF THE COVENANT Monty Parker, a twenty-nine-year-old nobleman with a plumage of luxuriant moustaches and pointed Edward VII beard, expensive tastes and minimal income, was an opportunistic but credulous rogue, always on the lookout for an easy way to make his fortune - or at least find someone else to pay for his luxuries. In 1908, this Old Etonian son of a Cabinet minister in Gladstone's last government, younger brother of the Earl of Morley, ex-Grenadier Guards officer and veteran of the Boer War, encountered a Finnish hierophant who convinced him that together they could discover in Jerusalem the most valuable treasure of world history. The Finn was Dr Valter Juvelius, a teacher, poet and spiritualist with a taste for dressing up in biblical robes and deciphering biblical codes.

…

Weizmann, this passionate Zionist, hater of tsarist Russia and despiser of anti-Zionist Jews, resembled 'a well-nourished Lenin' and was sometimes mistaken for him. A 'brilliant talker', his perfect English was always spiced with a Russian accent and his 'almost feminine charm [was] combined with feline deadliness of attack, burning enthusiasm and prophetic vision'. The Old Etonian and the graduate of Pinsk chever first met in 1906. Their chat was short but unforgettable. 'I remember Balfour sat in his usual pose, legs stretched out, an imperturbable expression.' It was Balfour, who as prime minister in 1903, had offered Uganda to the Zionists, but now he was out of power. Weizmann feared that his languid interest was just 'a mask', so he explained that if Moses had heard about Ugandaism 'he would surely have broken the tablets again'.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath
Published 23 Jun 2014

As of 2013, the prime minister, the next king but one, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief whip, the chief of staff at No. 10 Downing Street and the chief economic adviser at No. 11 all attended this same boys-only school, where fees are currently £32,000 a year. That summer, when David Cameron moved to ‘broaden his circle’ with new policy advisers, it was to two more Etonians that he turned.68 Yet if we cast such gripes aside, and take the concerns about social mobility at face value, then the priority must surely be to tackle social sclerosis at the bottom of the heap. And in the aftermath of the biggest slump in living memory, the single most pressing priority would have to be to ensure that unemployment does not become an inherited curse.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019
by Stewart Lee
Published 2 Sep 2019

Was it Disaster Racists, like my relative who voted Leave to ‘get rid of the Pakistanis and Indians’, and whose existence will now be questioned in below-the-line comments on the online version of this piece, accusing me of inventing a straw man to demonise stupid Leave voters, as if there were any need to fabricate one. Or was it the Disaster Johnsons, like Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Johnson, hoping to drop an Etonian biscuit into his reflection in the melted molten-metal puddle of post-Brexit Britain and let lustful nature take its course? Whoever is to blame, as Wednesday afternoon turned into Wednesday evening, and my 10 a.m. Thursday morning deadline loomed, the full impossibility of delivering the mildly satirical column expected of me by both my readers and my editor began to dawn on me.

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields
by Tim Butcher
Published 1 Apr 2011

… seediness has a very deep appeal: even the seediness of civilisation, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the ‘tarts’ in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the little tight-waisted Jews in the Strand. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back. Throughout the book the reader is given extraordinary snapshots from Graham Greene’s life, his own direct experience of seediness: an Old Etonian pervert in Kensington Gardens talking to strangers about caning schoolgirls; a vagrant who froze to death in a wintry Cotswolds cottage being dragged out by the police, his stiff corpse rattling down the stairs; an army Major telephoning a brothel on Savile Row and ordering girls, as if choosing a meal from a menu – young, fair, curved; an old Baltic aristocrat fallen on hard times, forced to carry tourists’ luggage as a porter.

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service
by Eric Thompson
Published 18 Apr 2018

As if that were not enough, Charterhouse was a private school that actually played proper football. It had virtually invented the game back in 1862, fifty years before my school was built, and it was a founder member of the Football Association. Old Carthusians were the first winners of the FA Cup (in which they beat Old Etonians). At least we had football in common, or so I thought. But Wilmott-Randall didn’t play soccer as he called it. He didn’t even play rugger. He shot. Mon Dieu! If I’d taken a gun into Coatbridge High School, I’d have been handed over to the police. If only I could have got the upper class twit on to a football pitch, I’d have shown him who was top dog.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Everyone comes alive if they feel someone is interested in what they have to say; it’s a dynamic process between speaker and listener, performer and audience. We all know people who make us feel dumb, and our lasting friendships or romantic attachments are usually with people who make us feel smart and witty and admirable (at least initially!). Was my evolution a kind of delayed onset of that infamous Etonian confidence? Or a need to prove myself to my high-achieving father? Maybe that is part of it, but I think just as plausible is that it resulted from achieving something in my own right, at least partly independent of the privileges of my background and schooling. That something was leading a team that launched a monthly magazine of ideas called Prospect and finding for the first time in my late thirties something I could do really well: commission and edit essays on current affairs and intellectual themes.

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 6 Oct 2011

He recalled in his memoirs that he had shouted to one of his men ‘who was our best wicket-keeper’ to catch it. The man replied, ‘No sir! It had a bit too much pace on. I thought you was long stop, so I left it for you.’ The cricket analogy was ever present. During the siege of Ladysmith in 1899 – two years after Newbolt had composed his famous lines – one Old Etonian wrote to his parents: ‘I think we “played the game” in keeping the Boers busy with us here.’ A couple of generations have now grown up ridiculing that sort of attitude. Everyone knows that war is not a game, and no one is much interested in the idioms which made it possible for our ancestors to deal with danger and death.

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland
by Rory Stewart
Published 14 Jul 2016

I asked what he called the instrument, half fearing he might have named it after some Celtic princess. He simply called it a ‘lap-harp’. He explained that he had been recently appointed as seanachaidh to a Highland chieftain, Maclean of Duart. The previous chieftain, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, an old Etonian war hero and Conservative politician, had not kept a seanachaidh. Indeed, it appeared seanachaidhs had died out long before Dr Johnson’s trip of 1774, perhaps as long ago as the 1400s. But as chieftains and their clan traditions were being forgotten in Scottish culture, seanachaidhs seemed to be reappearing.

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
Published 1 Jan 2005

I had met some people back home who still remembered British political officers who had served in Iraq between 1916 and 1958. St. John Philby was famous. Before he became political officer in Amara in 1917 and conceived his son, Kim, the British intelligence officer and KGB double agent, he had been a civil servant in the Punjab. The British representative in Basra remembered the old Etonian Dugald Stewart, consul in Amara, talking about driving his two-seater from Amara to Basra in 1952, for a black-tie dinner with the consul-general. But no one had ever mentioned Grimley. And yet it was somehow Mr. Grimley who had imprinted himself on the mind of the old sheikh and left his name in the landscape.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate
by Stewart Lee
Published 18 Aug 2010

And I saw dozens of superb new acts I’d never seen before, like the disarmingly honest Chippenham skinhead Will Hodgson and the brilliantly realised character comedy of Will Adamsdale in Jackson’s Way, which I attended half a dozen times at least, and which was to alter the whole way I thought about performance. Watching Will, an un categorisable Etonian performance-art eccentric who never blinked in the face of audience disbelief, maintaining the most improbable and engaging of conceits in the face of mass irritation and total audience boredom proved to me that one man on a stage in a room could be anything at all, go anywhere, say anything, suggest anything, do anything.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

But all he had been doing in the sting video—which had been seriously doctored, he assured everyone—was “playing along” with “ludicrous hypothetical scenarios.”4 Reuters posted a photograph of him trying to make his way through a scrum of reporters at the front doors of the SCL London office, a security guard gripping him tightly at the elbow to move him along. On Alexander’s face was a look of almost childlike amazement. None of this could have been easy for him—it was so tawdry, so very un-Etonian and dark. It was Theater of the Absurd on steroids. Technically, I stood apart from it. I no longer worked for Cambridge Analytica. I could watch it through the jaundiced eyes of a witness. I texted back and forth with Paul. “Were you fired?” he asked. “Or did you quit?” Something of both, I wrote back.

The Defence of the Realm
by Christopher Andrew
Published 2 Aug 2010

Masterton, secretary to the head of C (later H) Branch, Haldane, took over from him, at first temporarily, then permanently, the running of MO5(g)’s accounts, including much financial planning. The ‘Report on Women’s Work’ concluded that this was ‘the only example at this date of a woman managing the finances of a Government office’.41 By the standards of the time, gender relations were sometimes slightly flirtatious. A wartime cartoon by the Old Etonian Cambridge graduate Captain Hugh Gladstone, entitled ‘The Lost File’, shows an attractive young member of the Registry telling a male officer, ‘We’ve looked everywhere, but we can’t find any BAULZ in the Registry.’42 Harmless (not to say feeble) though the joke now appears, at the time it could not have appeared in print or been repeated in polite mixed company.

…

After one of his lectures, Major General Joseph Kuhn, president of the US Army War College in Washington, emphasized ‘how excellent the British service is’.121 In August 1917. Dansey left MI5 for SIS, where he spent the rest of his career, rising to become assistant chief. In January 1918 Lieutenant Colonel Hercules Pakenham, late of the Royal Irish Rifles and an experienced foreign liaison officer, became head of MI5’s Washington office.122 An Old Etonian and former ADC to the Governors General of Canada and India,123 Pakenham also had long American family connections; one of his ancestors not only lost the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, but managed to do so after the peace treaty ending the war had been signed. The arrival of US forces on the Western Front further increased the importance of American liaison.

…

‘Some of them ain’t seen no women for years.’3 Other prisoners, however, had. The ex-public-school ‘Mayfair Playboys’, who had been imprisoned earlier in the year for robbing highclass jewellers, had danced with some Registry staff at debutantes’ balls during the London season.4 The Playboys’ leader, the twenty-two-year-old Old Etonian Victor Hervey, the future sixth Marquess of Bristol, was later said to have provided some of the inspiration for the ‘Pink Panther’.5 The prison buildings, complained Milicent Bagot, ‘appeared never to have been ventilated since their erection and their smell was appalling.’6 The cell doors had no handles or locks on the inside.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

Halsey in 1981, with ‘the top half of the population receiving three quarters of all personal income, the bottom half one quarter’, and the richest 20 per cent owning three-quarters of all the nation’s personal wealth. But of course class was about more than just money. In the 1971 edition of his bestselling Anatomy of Britain series, Anthony Sampson noted that there were 65 Old Etonians in the House of Commons, accounting for 22 per cent of Heath’s new government. Oxbridge, meanwhile, maintained its ‘special hold’ over Westminster, Whitehall, Fleet Street and the BBC, providing 26 of the civil service’s 30 permanent secretaries, and 250 out of 630 members of Parliament. Of Heath’s seventeen-person Cabinet, all but three had been to Oxford or Cambridge.

…

The young man who placed a personal ad in The Ecologist in March 1974, hoping for a partner to ‘share the remaining years of industrial civilisation’ and experience the ‘end catastrophe’, may well have found a girlfriend eventually, but it is hard to believe that he was a very jaunty date. Even Jonathon Porritt, the Old Etonian baronet who chaired the Ecology Party in the late 1970s and became one of Britain’s best-known environmental campaigners, conceded that ‘there was too much doom and gloom in the early seventies, and there’s a limit to how much people will take’. They may have laughed along with Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, but most were too attached to their comforts to contemplate a life of self-sufficiency, and while they may have enjoyed watching Survivors on Wednesday nights, they had no desire to re-enact it themselves.57 And yet there is another side to the story.

Jennifer Morgue
by Stross, Charles
Published 12 Jan 2006

But — " My heart is pounding again, and my knees are even weaker than they were when I realized Eileen hadn't shot her. "We've got to do it in such a way that it's completely incompatible with the geas." "Okay, wise guy. So you've got a bright idea for an ending that simply wouldn't work in a Bond book" "Yes. See, the thing is, Bond's creator — like Bond himself — was a snob. Upper crust, old Etonian, terribly conventional. If he was around today he'd always be wearing a tailored suit, you'd never catch him in ripped jeans and a Nine Inch Nails tee shirt. And it goes deeper. He liked sex, but he was deeply ingrained with a particular view of gender relationships. Man of action, woman as bit of fluff on the side.

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

He will be remembered not for liberalising the Conservative party, as he attempted to do with social reforms such as legalising gay marriage, but for presiding over a period of austerity and creating the circumstances for leaving the EU. He will also be remembered for walking away with a typical old Etonian insouciance: now it was someone else’s mess to clear up. Cameron’s statement at 8.00 a.m. was preceded by an interview by Jeremy Corbyn at 7.30 a.m., in which he made two statements that would come back to haunt him. The British people have made their decision. We must respect that result and Article 50 has to be invoked now so that we negotiate an exit from the European Union.

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley
Published 22 Jul 2009

The 2005 transfer of the registered ownership of all his UK properties from offshore companies in obscure locations to his own name was also a sign of his intention of securing a more permanent base in the UK. In May 2008 Oleg Deripaska cemented his links with the UK by buying two racehorses and enlisting the help of one of Britain’s most prominent bloodstock agents, James Wigan. Deripaska already owned a number of racehorses in stables closer to home, near the Black Sea. He had met Wigan, an Old Etonian employed by Lord Rothschild, through his friendship with Nat Rothschild. Boris Berezovsky showed no sign of moving on from his bitter campaign against his country of birth. He continued to play the role of the slighted James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld from his fortified Mayfair offices. But, despite devoting the lion’s share of his fortune to this defiant campaign, he was still no nearer to his dream of unseating Putin and his chosen successor, Medvedev.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

I like to imagine the scene in Cooke Street in late April of that year. There was yet another letter sitting on Henry Royce’s desk, but one that, yet again, the engineer had had no time to answer. The letter had come from London; now it was in Manchester, and Henry Royce knew it would be yet another plea from this metropolitan swell, this Old Etonian and Cambridge graduate, pleading for Henry Royce to go down to London for a meeting. But Royce was not planning to budge. He was far too busy, and the work he was performing in his cramped little mechanical shop was consuming his every waking moment. All of the previous early-spring week, I like to suppose, he had been working on a near-impossible self-imposed task: he had been trying to machine a forged-steel crankshaft into such perfect balance that, once set spinning, it would never stop, as no one side of the shaft would be heavier than another, which would have tended to slow down the spinning.

After the Flood: What the Dambusters Did Next
by John Nichol
Published 1 Jul 2015

Air Marshal Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, turned to Barnes Wallis, shook his hand and said, ‘Wallis, I didn’t believe a word you said when you came to see me. But now you could sell me a pink elephant.’6 Gibson told Maltby and Martin, who had both used their bombs and sustained flak damage, to turn for home, while he, old Etonian Henry Maudslay, the baby-faced Australian David Shannon – only twenty, but another pilot who was already the holder of the DSO and DFC – and yet another Australian, twenty-two-year-old Les Knight, who ‘never smoked, drank or chased girls’,7 making him practically unique in 617 Squadron on all three counts, flew on to attack the next target, the Eder dam.

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World
by Tom Burgis
Published 7 Sep 2020

But Kenes was very keen to be perceived as a businessman – no, an entrepreneur – in his own right, not some frontman like, say, the Russian cellist whose $2 billion fortune was more likely related to his close friendship with Putin than business acumen. Angry Birds credit cards, that was one idea, or a cryptocurrency venture. He employed PR experts, such as the Etonian who would arrange for Western journalists to interview him and encourage them to seek his views on Brexit or other pressing matters of the day. These efforts failed to convince everyone, however. Executives from one of the companies in which Kenes had invested asked for a loan from the International Finance Corporation, the arm of the World Bank that supported private businesses.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

Hospital staff were instructed to review all patients twice a day and ask themselves: ‘Why not home? Why not today?’ Stevens had a long-standing connection with the prime minister stretching back decades. The pair had been unlikely friends after meeting at Balliol College, Oxford, where they studied in the mid-1980s. Johnson, an old Etonian and a former member of the Bullingdon Club, the notorious all-male dining society, was politically centre-right, while Stevens, known as ‘Simes’, had been educated at a Birmingham comprehensive school and was a member of the Labour Club. Yet their friendship was forged during a trip to America with the Oxford Union debating society.4 Many years later, when standing to be Conservative Party leader in 2019, Johnson described how Stevens had helped him get elected as union president in 1986.

A Dominant Character
by Samanth Subramanian
Published 27 Apr 2020

The shapely youths who were alleged to assuage the desires of this august body, often in return for presents, were known as ‘Pop bitches.’ ” Students carried these experiences like calluses upon their memories of Eton. Years after he left the school, the biologist Julian Huxley, who was five years ahead of Jack, met an Old Etonian who had belonged to a house with “rampant and horrible” sexual coercion. “Luckily, I was large and ugly,” he told Huxley, “but the pretty little boys . . . ,” and here he broke off, simply unable to finish. Jack never participated, and was never compelled to participate, in these activities, he maintained.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Indeed, it was defeated by huge margins on each occasion. Brexit demanded a prime minister of vision, imagination, cunning and epic powers of persuasion. She possessed none of those attributes. In the end May had little choice but to resign in July 2019, leaving the floor to Boris Johnson, the shambolic Old Etonian showman with an ethical deficit. Never a politician with an eye for detail, a long attention span or a close relationship with the truth, Johnson’s strategy was to put the population out of its misery as soon as possible. He would talk tough, resort to deceit, sophistry and evasion, and do whatever was necessary to get Britain out, preferably with some sort of withdrawal deal, however tawdry, but without one if absolutely necessary.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

In the early decades of the century flogging, carried out before the assembled pupils with a birch on the naked back, was universal and meted out for the tiniest of derelictions, such as making mistakes in the parsing of Latin or Greek. Mr Creakle, the headmaster portrayed in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850), ‘laid about him, right and left, every day of his life, charging in among the boys like a trooper, and slashing away, unmercifully’. Acts of rebellion were just as routine as schoolmasterly violence. One Etonian paid for an artist to paint a portrait of the headmaster on his own back, expecting as all boys did to be flogged: the head was said to have used two birches to obliterate it, breaking the first one in the ferocity of his onslaught. At Winchester in 1818 the boys occupied the towers and sealed up the warden’s doors.

…

Initially in England the Football Association, founded in 1863 in an attempt to enforce the ‘Cambridge rules’ – drawn up in 1848 by representatives of the public schools at Trinity College, Cambridge – was dominated by elite educational establishments. But in 1883 the working-class team of Blackburn Olympic inaugurated a new era when it defeated the Old Etonians in the Football Association Cup Final. The game rapidly spread to the Continent, usually taken there by the British. As early as 1863 The Scotsman newspaper reported that ‘a number of English gentlemen living in Paris have lately organized a football club … The football contests take place in the Bois de Boulogne, by permission of the authorities, and surprise the French amazingly.’

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 12 May 2014

The four budgets Dalton introduced earned him a reputation as ‘the most socialist – or at any rate, the most levelling – chancellor ever to have held office’. As one of his protégés, Anthony Crosland, later observed, Dalton ‘maintained, and even extended, the great advance towards income-equality that was made during the war’.4 The son of a clergyman, Dalton was an Old Etonian who had just failed to win a scholarship to the prestigious school. His aggressive manner was bound up in a welter of social insecurities and pompous self-assertion. Once, when dining in the House of Commons, he interrupted his own monologue to boom in the direction of a Conservative MP, ‘What’s that suburbanite looking at me for?’

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

On Lords committees scrutinising last year’s budget, peers who were paid by finance firms formed the majority.’35 The City of London Corporation, representing the financial sector, called in public relations and lobbying firm Quiller to do ‘high profile, intensive crisis and reputation management’. Quiller is run by George Bridges, old Etonian, Oxford graduate and friend of George Osborne, and 2006 campaign director of the Conservative Party. Mervyn King, outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, said this to the Treasury Select Committee in 2013: ‘It’s also important that banks don’t leave conversations with the supervisors [that is, financial regulators] and feel that the next step is to telephone Number 11 [the Chancellor’s official home] or even Number 10 Downing Street, and lobby officials or politicians to put pressure on the supervisors to back down on their judgements.’

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013

Clans in Scotland are proud of being firm-welded entities of great antiquity—all McKenzies and MacNeils are one, Scots like to say, whether fortune or happenstance has led them to be dukes or dustmen. Elsewhere class and the tendency toward an intellectual aristocracy have magnified a sense of union—Etonians, graduates of Hotchkiss and Science Po, Harvard and Christ Church may all bond clubbably, as may most European marquesses and counts or their American equivalents, the Biddles, Lowells, Cabots, and Saltonstalls. Race likewise has an annealing affect: Harlem and Hough and Watts and a score of other places have long offered local concentrations of great resilience, strength, and pride.

New World, Inc.
by John Butman
Published 20 Mar 2018

This involved enclosing their fields with wooden fences, rows of stones and mounds of earth, or hedges—and thereby removing them from common use. Such enclosure made good economic sense for the landowners. Wool for cloth was in high demand, and the cost of grazing sheep was considerably less than the cost of growing grain or corn. Thomas Tusser, an old Etonian Norfolk farmer, reckoned that enclosure made land three times more profitable than when it was made available to everyone.16 But the effects on local communities could be disastrous. Smith noted that a plot of land that once employed one or two hundred people would, after enclosure, serve only the owner and a few shepherds.17 Without employment—or even land to grow food or graze small flocks—entire villages were abandoned.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Personality outweighs ideology by miles: it’s a long ideological journey from “Red” Ken Livingstone to Tory “Mayor Jolly-Good-Fun” Boris Johnson, yet both are characters who stand for aspects of London’s urban persona. Livingstone, a radical leftist with “sometimes wacky policies” has nonetheless developed a loyal post-ideological following, and Johnson, despite being a self-described “libertarian anarcho-Tory,”7 and in the face of “all his maverick bluster” and his status as a “Latin-spouting old Etonian with a quip for every occasion,” is in fact a “capable administrator and high profile champion for London,” far more popular than Prime Minister David Cameron and, for some Tories, the man who should be Cameron’s successor.8 No wonder that the two rivals again contested the London mayoralty election in 2012 around issues other than ideology, and that despite his Conservative Party’s declining poll numbers, Johnson eked out a second victory over Livingstone.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

And here lies another reason, or justification, for the relentless and almost thoughtless pursuit of wealth: the heroic myth of the wealth creator is tied up intimately with a libertarian, anti-government, anti-society ideology which pervades tax havens, the world of global finance, upper income brackets and especially the super-rich.18 Spend time talking to people offshore, in parts of the City of London or in the world of trusts and wealth management, and you’ll crash into these attitudes again and again. Government is ‘a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world’, opined Matt Ridley, the wealthy old-Etonian son of the 4th Viscount Ridley. ‘Governments do not run countries; they parasitise them.’ Not long after he said this, the bank that he was chairman of, Northern Rock, collapsed and needed a huge government bailout. I got a forceful verbal blast of these attitudes – typical of what I have encountered in tax haven after haven – from Adolfo Linares, a prominent Panamanian lawyer, who vented to me in a bar in Panama in 2016.

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky
by Oleg Gordievsky
Published 13 Apr 2015

In London Bogdanov tried to make contact with Joan Ruddock, and invited her to drinks; whether she was nervous that someone might compromise her or try to photograph her in the company of a Soviet official, I do not know, but she stayed away. Her anxiety was, no doubt, increased by the rumours that CND was receiving Soviet money although I have no evidence that this was true. For sheer naivety, we all agreed that no one could touch Tam Dalyell, the Old Etonian left-winger with a castle in Scotland. Although never classed as a confidential contact, he became useful to the KGB’s propaganda initiative because of his obsession about the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano during the Falklands War. As I have said, the KGB and the Soviet establishment were strongly on the Argentinian side in the conflict, so that anyone who criticized Britain’s handling of the war and the Conservative government found a warm interest in Moscow.

Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die: How the Allies Won on D-Day
by Giles Milton
Published 25 Jan 2019

‘We did the quickest wheel change that I think has ever been done outside of a Grand Prix meeting and got back to join the headquarters.’4 The liberation of Bayeux would have to wait a few more hours. The biggest problem of the day was with wireless communications: it very nearly proved fatal, not just to Gold Beach but to the entire military operation. Such was the opinion of an observation officer named Richard Gosling, an eccentric Old Etonian who had been one of the first men ashore at Gold. He had always treated modern technology with a healthy degree of scepticism: it was the reason why he had landed with a Victorian firearm tucked into his belt. ‘I had a wonderful old revolver which had belonged to my Uncle Seymour in the Boer War.’

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

Henry’s workmen did, however, start on the college’s finest building, the much-celebrated King’s College Chapel, on the north side of today’s Great Court. King’s College once enjoyed an exclusive supply of students from Eton and until 1851 claimed the right to award its students degrees without their taking any examinations. The first non-Etonians were only accepted in 1873. Times have changed, however, and King’s is now one of the university’s more progressive colleges – it was among the first three to admit women, in 1972, and consistently has one of the highest intakes of state-school students. King’s College Chapel Entrance either via the main gatehouse on King’s Parade or the North Gate, at the end of Senate House Passage Committed to canvas by Turner and Canaletto, and eulogized in no fewer than three sonnets by Wordsworth, King’s College Chapel is now internationally famous for its boys’ choir, whose members process across the college grounds during term time in their antiquated garb to sing evensong (Tues–Sat at 5.30pm, plus choral services Sun 10.30am & 3.30pm) and carols on Christmas Eve.

…

In the event, none of the three was able to secure a Parliamentary majority in the general election, but an impasse was avoided when the Liberal Democrats swapped principles for power to join a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition, which took office in May 2010 with Conservative David Cameron as prime minister. The Cameron years An old Etonian with a PR background, David Cameron (b.1966) made a confident and sure-footed start as prime minister, keeping his ideological cards well hidden (if indeed he had any), while his government set about a concerted attack on the public sector on the pretext of the need for austerity following the financial crash.

The Enemy Within
by Seumas Milne
Published 1 Dec 1994

Referring to his December motion, Dalyell said that since it had been tabled, ‘statements have been made to me about the involvement of Stella Rimington and Mr Roger Windsor of the NUM. The motion raises serious issues and calls for some sort of response.’ MacGregor replied that it had been a longstanding practice not to comment on MI5 operations and he did not intend to depart from that precedent.56 Dalyell – an old Etonian who lives in a wing of his family seat, ‘The Binns’, and is renowned for his wide range of high-level contacts in the civil service, police and armed forces – later told the author that his question had been based on information from two separate senior Whitehall sources. He described these informants as ‘solid gold’ – better placed, indeed, than those who had provided the devastatingly accurate tip-offs for his long-running campaign to expose the events surrounding Margaret Thatcher’s decision to sink the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands War.

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund
by Anita Raghavan
Published 4 Jun 2013

At the August 2007 event, guests wore black T-shirts that read “The Riotous, Rowdy, Rebellious Raj Tribe.” The campus of IIT Delhi, where Rajat Gupta graduated in 1971. The school has become an incubator for global leaders in technology and finance. (Courtesy of the Hindu.) Kashmir House at the Doon School. The old boy network of Doscos, India’s answer to Etonians, aided Anil Kumar as he helped launch McKinsey’s business in India. The aspiration of a Doon School boy as laid out by its first headmaster. Sanjay Wadhwa, senior associate regional director of the New York office, came to the United States from India in 1986. Wadhwa paid for his undergraduate education by working fifty-hour weeks as a stockroom boy and cashier at a local drugstore.

Inside British Intelligence
by Gordon Thomas

Partly because they had minimal understanding of Iranian culture, the Russians achieved little, and the MI6 chief, Stewart Menzies, despite a strong anti-Bolshevik mood among his senior officers, decided the presence of the Soviet spies posed no serious threat. Menzies, the third man to be appointed chief, was an Old Etonian who spent his weekends riding with the Beaufort and Quorn hunt, and he would sometimes discreetly claim to his country house hosts he was the bastard son of King Edward VII. As well as creating a frisson of excitement, it added to the mystery he liked to cultivate. When war started he spent a part of his day reading the communications of the French, Belgian, Norwegian, and Dutch intelligence officers working with their governments in exile in London.

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy
by Rory Cormac
Published 14 Jun 2018

Guided by the new cabinet secretary, Burke Trend, Douglas-Home enthusiastically agreed and approved the formation of the Joint Action Committee (JAC).9 Created in July 1964, the JAC formed part of a broader reorganization of the joint intelligence machinery.10 Bernard Burrows chaired it himself. Tall and handsome, Burrows enjoyed an eventful diplomatic career and has been described as one of the five most powerful men in the Foreign Office at the time. An old Etonian, he radiated an air of natural authority but possessed a kindly demeanour and lacked self-importance. Outside of public life, he cultivated eccentric interests in crop circles and square-dancing.11 Burrows was a sensible choice for chair, not least because the JAC drew heavily on Joint Intelligence Committee assessments and shared its secretariat.12 Burrows’ colleagues on the new body were, at Trend’s insistence, hand-picked.13 Trend had become cabinet secretary at the start of 1963 and, like Norman Brook before him, took a close interest in intelligence.

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
by Leah McGrath Goodman
Published 15 Feb 2011

“The stories about Vinnie got so widespread, I was hearing about him from the guys over at Goldman,” says one former Nymex executive. “Vinnie had become this iconic figure on Wall Street after leading the oil market out of 9/11. So I’m standing there, trying to keep a straight face, while some gap-toothed, blue-blood Etonian is telling me about how Vinnie rises like Lazarus, half his face hanging off, and calmly tells his wife to call the paramedics. While he’s waiting, he bench-presses five hundred. That’s roughly the kind of stuff I was hearing.” Many of the pit traders had trouble coming to grips with a man of Viola’s stature being felled by something as ordinary as a garage door.

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019

Hirst was on the cusp of that fame in 1993, when dealer Jay Jopling opened the London gallery he called White Cube.7 Like Anthony d’Offay, Jopling had been immersed in art as a child, parked at the museum—in his case the Tate—while his mother went on errands.8 He was just 30 when he persuaded Christie’s to lease him a space for free amid the Old Masters shops of Duke Street. The Young British Artists were right in step with Jopling, none more so than Hirst. Hirst and Jopling met in a pub, an unlikely duo: Jopling a pinstriped Old Etonian and son of a former Tory agriculture minister, Hirst wearing his working-class background on his sleeve. Yet the next day Jopling signed him up, having only seen Hirst’s plans. “He had very detailed computerized drawings of how these sculptures would be fabricated,” Jopling recounted. “To see these diagrams and plans for works of art I thought were extremely strong was very exciting.”9 Hirst was eager to take on the art world.

Lonely Planet London
by Lonely Planet
Published 22 Apr 2012

Johnson’s first mayoral term coincided with London’s transformation for the 2012 Olympic Games, as neglected areas of this recession-hit city were showered with investment and a vast building program in East London took shape (Click here). The era also saw a transferral of government power from the lacklustre Labour Party under Gordon Brown’s leadership to a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government with fellow Etonian David Cameron as prime minister. But with so much to play for in the next mayoral election, it’s likely that Ken vs Boris, round two, in 2012 will be even more of a spectacle. In 2012, London will be the first city in the world to host the Olympic Games for the third time. Timeline AD 43 The Romans invade Britain, led by Emperor Claudius himself.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Thus, you must not offend Mohammed (who wasn’t massively into the gay rights agenda) nor must you say anything even remotely “homophobic”.68 The crucial question is: what follows from this? That you should not be allowed to insult Christians in Britain? Or that you should be free to insult Muslims, Jews and homosexuals just as you can Christians, Old Etonians and estate agents? Identity lobbyists feed on the strong claim for equality in modern democracies but themselves often display double standards. In 2006, the then secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie (who once said death was perhaps too good for Salman Rushdie) denounced the publication of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, but scarcely a month later he publicly declared that gays are ‘harmful’ and ‘spread disease’.69 Abraham Foxman and Christopher Wolf of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States argue that YouTube was right to leave up the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video (which they mildly describe as ‘mean-spirited’) but insist that Facebook should take down Holocaust denial because it is hate speech.70 If we are to be free of such double standards and take seriously the claim for equal treatment under the law, we stand at a crossroads.

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More
by Jason Cochran
Published 5 Feb 2007

The Castle is the superstar here, but minor supporting roles are played by the succinctly named Great Park adjoining it; the 4.8km (3-mile), pin-straight Long Walk that culminates with an equestrian statue of George III; and the museum at Eton College (% 01753/67-11-77; www.etoncollege.com; £4.20 adults, £3.25 children/seniors/students; guided tours Mar–Oct at 2:15 and 3:15pm, £5.50 adults, £4.50 children/seniors/students), a short walk over the Thames (which is narrow at this western remove) from the castle. Eton is one of the most exclusive, most unbelievably posh boys’ schools in England. Princes Harry and William are alums, known as Old Etonians, as are kings and princes from around the world. The Guildhall (High St.; % 01753/74-39-00; free admission), just south of the castle, was where Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles had a quiet civil marriage in April 2005; it’s no St. Paul’s, where in 1981 Charles wed his first wife, what’s-her-name, but it is also the work of Christopher Wren (note its delicate arches).

The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes
Published 15 Jan 2008

The actress Mrs Sage, renowned for her Junoesque figure, left a vivid account of being the ‘First Aerial female’ after an eventful ascent in Lunardi’s balloon in June 1785. The launch was made from Hyde Park, attended by a huge and increasingly raucous crowd. Mrs Sage, in a low-cut silk dress presumably designed to reduce wind resistance, was to be accompanied by Lunardi and the dashing Mr George Biggin, a young and wealthy Old Etonian. The gondola was draped in heavy swags of silk, and had a specially designed lace-up door which allowed its occupants to be seen more clearly, as if they were installed in a luxurious aerial salon.46 But the combined weight of the fixtures and fittings, and the three passengers, proved too much for the balloon, which began wallowing dangerously on its moorings, to the whistles and suggestive jeers of the crowd.

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
by Wade Davis
Published 27 Sep 2011

That same year Charterhouse graduated 411 upperclassmen, all of whom proceeded directly to the trenches. The chances of emerging unscathed were slim. Indeed, in 1914, the chances of any British boy aged thirteen through twenty-four surviving the war were one in three. Schools, on average, lost five years’ worth of students. The student body of Eton numbered 1,100; in the war, 1,157 Old Etonians would perish. Wellington, a school of only 500, would sacrifice 699. Uppingham would lose 447, Winchester 500, Harrow 600, Marlborough 733, and Charterhouse 686. The Public Schools Club in London lost over 800 members, forcing it to close for lack of numbers. Of the thousands of public school boys who entered the war, one in five would perish.

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
by Charles Emmerson
Published 14 Oct 2019

Meeting Vladimir in the Kremlin, one of the British delegates compares Soviet Russia to a patient recovering from a serious illness: sick, but on the mend. Yes, Lenin pounces, that’s it. And the revolution is like a severe but vitally necessary operation. The delegates arrive in Russia wanting to believe in the great experiment, or at least wanting to approach it with an open mind. They leave it disappointed. The commissars are worse than the old Etonians they have to deal with back home. The intellectual inflexibility of the Bolsheviks grates. Is poetry, art, love, all just a subset of Marxist theory? On a long cruise down the Volga, even the philosopher attached to the British delegation grows a little tired of interminable discussion of the materialistic conception of history.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1990

Young bond traders were suddenly driving Ferraris and making six-figure salaries. The elite world of merchant banking faded as the rhythms of the trader speeded up City life. Long lunches at Boodle’s or White’s gave way to twelve-hour days. It was impossible to equip all the trading desks with old Etonians, and so the City became a more egalitarian place. Some people, of course, resisted the new ways. When the Economist tried to track down City executives, it discovered several absentees: “Many were sighted at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, the Henley regatta and the Ascot horse races.”2 For the most part, however, the City was now a more hectic, grueling place, with people grabbing lunches at the fast-food restaurants and crowded sandwich shops scattered among the Wren churches and new office blocks.

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912
by Thomas Pakenham
Published 19 Nov 1991

The more testing part of the tour of British East Africa (modern Kenya) he did not confide to readers of the Strand Magazine (or of his exuberant travel book, My African Journey). A couple of thousand newly-arrived white settlers were defying – indeed, baiting – the governor of the protectorate. Their leaders, some of them old Etonians, others Boers from South Africa, swaggered around with guns and jamboks. Ewart Grogan, President of the Colonists Association and famous for his Cape-to-Cairo walk in 1899, was keen to show that Kenya was ‘white man’s country’. In March 1907, a few months before Churchill’s arrival, Grogan had taken three Kikuyu servants and flogged them right in front of the courthouse at Nairobi.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
Published 17 Sep 2012

Harry Moseley was in Australia with his mother at the beginning of August, attending the 1914 British Association meeting, in his spare time searching out the duck-billed platypus and picturesque silver mines. The patriotism of the Australians, who immediately began mobilizing, triggered his own Etonian spirit of loyalty to King and country. He sailed for England as soon as he could book passage. By late October he had gingered up a reluctant recruiting officer to arrange his commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers ahead of the waiting list. * * * Chaim Weizmann, the tall, sturdy, Russian-born Jewish biochemist who was Ernest Rutherford’s good friend at Manchester, was a passionate Zionist at a time when many, including many influential British Jews, believed Zionism to be at least visionary and naive if not wrongheaded, fanatic, even a menace.

England
by David Else
Published 14 Oct 2010

Lanhydrock House Lanhydrock (NT; 01208-265950; adult/child £9/4.50, gardens only £5/2.50; house 11am-5.30pm Tue-Sun mid-Mar–Sep, to 5pm Oct, gardens 10am-6pm year-round) is reminiscent of the classic ‘upstairs-­downstairs’ film Gosford Park. Set in 365 hectares of sweeping grounds above the River Fowey, parts date from the 17th century but the property was extensively rebuilt after a fire in 1881, creating the quintessential Victorian county house. Highlights include the gentlemen’s smoking room (complete with old Etonian photos, moose heads and tigerskin rugs), the children’s toy-strewn nursery, and the huge original kitchens. Lanhydrock is 2½ miles southeast of Bodmin; you’ll need your own transport to get here. Restormel Castle A glorious, fairy-tale crumbling ruin, the 13th-century Restormel Castle (01208-872687; adult/child £2.50/1; 10am-6pm Jul & Aug, 10am-5pm mid-Mar–Jun & Sep, 10am-4pm Oct) has one of the best-preserved circular keeps in England.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

‘The prevalent feeling’, wrote Max Nordau, ‘is that of imminent perdition and extinction.’68 In England, Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900), author of several brilliant comic dramas, notably The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), spent two bitter years in Reading Gaol for homosexual offences. Much of the work of his collaborator, the erotic illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), was unpunishable, as was that of Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), poet, critic, and Old Etonian flagellant. The mood of these aesthetes was totally at odds with the preoccupations of most sections of society, where religious observance, social betterment, and temperance were at their height, [BAMBINI] [TOUR] Modern painting broke forever with the representational art which had prevailed since the Renaissance, and which photography had now rendered obsolete.

Great Britain
by David Else and Fionn Davenport
Published 2 Jan 2007

Lanhydrock House Lanhydrock (NT; 01208-265950; adult/child £9/4.50, gardens only £5/2.50; house 11am-5.30pm Tue-Sun mid-Mar–Sep, to 5pm Oct, gardens 10am-6pm year round) is reminiscent of the classic ‘upstairs-downstairs’ film Gosford Park. Set in 900 acres of sweeping grounds above the River Fowey, parts date from the 17th century but the property was extensively rebuilt after a fire in 1881, creating the quintessential Victorian county house. Highlights include the gentlemen’s smoking room (complete with old Etonian photos, moose heads and tigerskin rugs), the children’s toy-strewn nursery, and the huge original kitchens. Lanhydrock is 2.5 miles southeast of Bodmin; you’ll need your own transport to get here. Restormel Castle A glorious, fairytale crumbling ruin, the 13th-century Restormel Castle ( 01208-872687; adult/child £2.50/1; 10am-6pm Jul & Aug, 10am-5pm mid-Mar–Jun & Sep, 10am-4pm Oct) has one of the best-preserved circular keeps in England.