Government failure stems from a network of private schools and elite universities, says Guardian columnist John Harris
by the government’s ethics adviser, Laurie Magnus, a former financier and “3rd baronet”, who is – guess what? – an alumnus of both Oxford and Eton.
To some extent, I have seen how these absurdly narrow cliques cohere, and why Britain – or rather England – still looks more like a weird fortified city-state than a forward-looking country. In 1989, I went to Oxford, having made it there from a comprehensive school and a state-sector sixth-form college.
‘When David Cameron became Tory leader, the renaissance of poshness and entitlement was complete.’ Boris Johnson and Cameron in 2006.Somewhere outside my social circles were people who had arrived at Oxford secure in the knowledge that they would be both comfortable in such grand surroundings and in touch with lots of people they already counted as friends .
For all Margaret Thatcher’s patina of petit-bourgeois meritocracy, he said, “during her reign, privilege and the right accent became something to be celebrated again”. You see this vividly in the infamousfeaturing Johnson and David Cameron, taken at Oxford in 1987; two decades later, when Cameron became Tory leader, the renaissance of poshness and entitlement was complete.
The context for these tragedies remains as brazen and appalling as ever: at the last count, senior judges were
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