Is there such a thing as a public school personality which encapsulates both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn? Or one which links Philip Green to Richard Branson? What about Nigel Farage and Tony Benn? On the face of it these high achievers would appear to be diametrically opposed personalities. But they are all products of the same system. They have each spent long spells inside institutions where it was impressed upon them that whatever else happens in the world they must make a success out of their own lives. They are the chosen ones, plucked from the people to perform great things.
A public school education is a carefully constructed process which turns boys and girls into leaders of armies, political parties, multinational corporations and cricket teams. Pupils leave school with inflated egos, unshakeable faith in their own abilities and a craving for success. But this system for the self-selection of our leaders, which may have served us well in times of Empire and war (although, as we have seen, with some mixed results), may be damaging to a nation that is trying to come to terms with a more modest place in world affairs.
In an article published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy in May 2011, acclaimed Jungian psychotherapist Joy Schaverien first introduced the term ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ to identify a set of lasting psychological problems that are observable in adults who, as children, went to boarding schools. She found that children sent away to school at an early age suffer the ‘sudden and often irrevocable loss of their primary attachments’, which can cause ‘significant trauma’. She reported: ‘Bullying and sexual abuse, by staff or other children, may follow and so new attachment figures may become unsafe. In order to adapt to the system, a defensive and protective encapsulation of the self may be acquired; the true identity of the person then remains hidden.’
Another psychotherapist, Nick Duffell, author of books The Making of Them and Wounded Leaders, strongly believes there may be a real problem with this kind of schooling when it comes to the hot-housing of our leaders. Duffell has been conducting psychotherapy with ex-boarders for twenty-five years and is a former boarding school teacher and boarder himself. His pioneering study of privileged abandonment showed that sending children to boarding school is poor training for leadership. He says the issue is a complex one but his studies show that children survive boarding by ‘cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives’. He says that ‘socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hot-housing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.’ He calls the condition the ‘entitlement illusion’.
Duffell argues that public schoolboys making their way in the real world are already damaged. He describes David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin all as boarding school survivors.1 ‘Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers.’
Outside the confines of an all-male environment the public schoolboy can end up regarding women as trophies or exploiting them to achieve their greater goals. In 1988 Boris Johnson wrote a guide for aspiring Oxford University politicians in which he explained the best way to utilise female students. In The Oxford Myth, edited by his sister, he said:
The Tory Reform Group [TFG] has the most social cachet of the OUCA [Oxford Union Conservative Association] machines, and its sherry party, laid on by its entertainment bureau, ‘the Disraeli’, presents rich pickings for the proto-hack. Lonely girls from the women’s colleges, very often scientists, find themselves there and suddenly discover their own worth. Under assiduous courting, they become the TFG rep for St Hilda’s or Somerville. Within a few weeks they are well on the way to becoming figures recognisable from English political life. With their fresh complexions and flowery frocks, they are the prototypes of local Conservative Party workers. Brisk, stern, running to fat, but backing their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness they are vital people for the new TRG candidate to cultivate. For these young women in their structured world of molecules and quarks, machine politics offers human friction and warmth. The strongholds of this earnest middle-class Tory politics are in the women’s colleges, Worcester and Christ Church. It would not have much chance of flowering in somnolent New College or the prickly bed of Balliol. It relies on discipline, loyalty and an unappreciated amount of political fervour.2
Duffell warns that with so many senior members of the cabinet from such backgrounds, the ‘political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it’s the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.’
Duffell believes ex-boarders develop tactics for ‘strategic survival’. He says: ‘bullying is one; others include keeping your head down, becoming a charming bumbler, or keeping an incongruently unruffled smile in place, like health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy at Charterhouse.’
Politicians like Cameron, Johnson, Gove, Osborne and Farage share an insatiable thirst for power and influence. In Victorian times such desire was tempered by the moral code of muscular Christianity. Today there is no brake. Jeremy Paxman, in his book Friends in High Places, came close to concluding that the modern public school is devoid of a code of morality and that boys are simply out for themselves. ‘There is plenty of talk of Christian values but few have any idea what they mean in practice,’ Paxman wrote in 1990, adding that it was ‘scarcely surprising that there is widespread agreement that the current generation of public school pupils suffers from an inner spiritual emptiness and a lack of curiosity.’3
Three years earlier the headmaster of Wellington College, David Newsome, put it more candidly: ‘When I observe the shallow materialism of some of the homes from which our boys come, and the glib expectation that a school such as mine will provide the culture, sensitivity and spirituality that are so flagrantly inconspicuous in the domestic mise-en-scene, I feel a twinge of despair.’4
But Paxman pointed out: ‘It is quite different training young people for the old role of “serving society” and training them to make a lot of money.’ One bishop whose pastoral role included visiting a number of well-known public schools had confided in Paxman that the idea of ‘vocation’ had almost disappeared. ‘It’s quite frightening,’ he told the journalist, ‘how selfish the pupils have become. They are overwhelmingly out for themselves.’
And John Rae confirmed this idea of an education devoid of moral responsibility when he wrote in The Times on 31 July 1987: ‘Whatever their private misgivings, the schools endorse the priorities of the age: every man for himself in the competition for good A levels, a good university, a well paid job and red Porsche to roar up the school drive, scattering former teachers like nature’s rejects in the race of life.’
This lack of moral vocation is clearly demonstrated by Cameron’s class of 1984. As we saw in Chapter 10, only one of the forty-five Old Etonians went on to perform a community service or vocation in their later career. The one who did, entering the state education system, ended up leaving and teaching at a private school.
Will Hutton observed of Cameron in 2011: ‘For him, politics is not about statecraft in pursuit of a national vision that embraces all the British. It is an enjoyable game to be played for a few years, in which the task is to get his set in and look after them and hand the baton on to the next chap who will do the same. The overriding preoccupation was to manage his tribe, now in thrall to the worst ancient Tory instincts which have been so consistently wrong.’5
Equally, George Osborne knew how to play his hand. It was a game that saw him become an MP before his thirtieth birthday, shadow chancellor at thirty-five and chancellor before turning forty. Achievements to make any housemaster proud. Having spruced up the CV, he picked up six more jobs in just a few weeks, including major conflicts of interest with his role as a member of parliament. There are rules that strictly regulate the movement of politicians from high office to big jobs outside government. But Osborne didn’t bother waiting for permission from either the Cabinet Office or the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA).6
For Owen Jones, Osborne’s seamless switch from Westminster to Fleet Street reflected the gulf between the unconnected working class and the wealthy elite.
Talented working-class aspiring journalists are discriminated against because they can’t live off the Bank of Mum and Dad. With few exceptions, only the well-to-do can afford to do the unpaid internships and expensive journalism masters’ degrees that increasingly must adorn the CVs of those with hopes of making it into journalism. Having parents with connections has helped multiple journalists, too. And yet a man with precious little experience in journalism – other than being rejected by the Times’s graduate scheme – can get parachuted into the editor’s seat of a major newspaper because of who he is and who he knows. A cushy job for the ex-chancellor while the salaries of overworked Evening Standard employees are slashed.7
The extent to which Osborne’s public school experience is responsible for his personal approach can be found in his blind belief in its product. He once told one of his special advisers at the Treasury that the quality of teaching at St Paul’s was superior to that at Oxford.8
Osborne is, of course, not alone in trampling over the rules that govern public servants’ behaviour. His friend and chief of staff, Old Etonian Rupert Harrison, left the government in 2015, also to join BlackRock, where he helped develop its retirement proposition. Given that Harrison was the one who drove forward the pension freedom reforms ushered in by the Tories, he was accused of a major conflict of interest. Although ACOBA waived through both Harrison and Osborne’s appointments, others cried foul, including Labour MP John Mann who said: ‘There is far too much cosying up to banks. It is as if BlackRock had taken shares in the Treasury.’9
Why do Harrison, Osborne, Johnson and Cameron find it so easy to help themselves to top jobs? The truth is a public school education not only gives a student a solid academic foundation, a burning ambition and a stellar contacts book – it also equips them with a range of non-cognitive skills which allow them to capitalise on their privilege and advantage. A 2014 study by the Social Market Foundation identified these non-cognitive skills as confidence, communication and resilience. The report concluded that such trained skills were thirty-three times more important in determining employment outcomes between cohorts born in 1958 and 1970 (the years when Cameron, Johnson and Osborne were at school). The authors said: ‘A leading explanation for this is that jobs moved away from manufacturing to services, which require stronger non-cognitive skills. Other work has shown that social and communications skills, as well as physical and psychological characteristics, are becoming as important as formal educational attainment in determining later success.’10
But despite old boys appearing to embody stereotypical leadership traits, neuroscience experts say that the boarding school education is a poor training for leadership because leaders cannot make good decisions without emotional information. American neuroscientist Professor Antonio Damasio has conducted trials which show cold rational thought is less important in conducting negotiations than well-formed emotional calculation.11
Duffell suggests part of the public school temperament is a ‘display of pseudo-adult seriousness’ which he says is evident in the ‘theatrical concern’ of Cameron as it was in Tony Blair.
‘It displays the strategic duplicity learned in childhood; it is hard to get rid of, and, disastrously, deceives even its creator. The social privilege of boarding is psychologically double-edged: it both creates shame that prevents sufferers from acknowledging their problems, as well as unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence.’ Duffell says this is very noticeable in someone like Boris Johnson who is so supremely confident that he ‘needs neither surname nor adult haircut’ and who uses his ‘buffoonery to distract the public from what the former media mogul, Conrad Black, called “a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear”’.
Johnson is not afraid of brandishing his elitism to enhance his leadership credentials. He exploits his training in classics and rhetoric to convey an aura of a divine right to rule. Duffell recalls one occasion which brought all this together in one act: ‘On the steps of St Paul’s, Boris commanded the Occupy [protest] movement: “In the name of God and Mammon, go!” Was it a lark – Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded message, announcing someone who, for ten years, heard the King James Bible read in chapel at Eton? Those who don’t recognise this language, it suggests, have no right to be here, so they should just clear off.’
This kind of language is not only out of step with a modern democracy but, in the wrong hands, it can also damage the national interest. Such was the case when Boris Johnson, now foreign secretary, arrived on a diplomatic mission to Myanmar. He recited the opening verse to Kipling’s colonial poem ‘The Road to Mandalay’ while inside the Shwedagon Pagoda, a sacred Buddhist site. Kipling’s poem captures the nostalgia of a retired serviceman looking back on his colonial service and a Burmese girl he kissed. Britain colonised Myanmar from 1824 to 1948 and fought three wars there in the nineteenth century, suppressing widespread resistance. Johnson’s impromptu recital was so embarrassing that the UK ambassador to Myanmar, Andrew Patrick, was forced to stop him.12
To many of Johnson’s political foes, his bumbling, erudite persona belies a steely ruthlessness. His former editor at the Telegraph, Max Hastings, had much worse to say about him after Johnson quit the race for the Tory leadership: ‘Values, decency and honesty play a diminished part in modern politics – but the British people may be grateful that it is still a sufficient one to have halted the march on Downing Street of this dangerous charlatan.’13
Of course, not every public school pupil will succeed in the terms defined and recognised by their parents and peers. They will begin competing for places, prizes and scholarships from as young as seven years of age and spend an education acutely aware how much money is being spent on them.
Tony Little, in his valedictory interview before stepping down in 2015 as Eton head, warned that some parents wanted to live their lives through their children, creating pressures and expectations that may not be met. ‘There has been a growth in some parents vicariously living their lives through their ambitions for their children,’ he said. ‘Some parents see where they want their child to be and when that doesn’t happen, or the child doesn’t want it to happen, it causes significant stresses.’ His comments follow those of Clarissa Farr, who said in 2014 when she was head of St Paul’s Girls’ School that many parents showed ‘frenzied anxiety’ about success, leaving their children unable to cope with failure.14
For pupils from schools like Eton and Harrow, where every assembly and morning prayers includes a reminder of what their famous forebears have achieved, the fear of failing can be crushing. They will have failed because they aren’t a cabinet minister, don’t run a FTSE 100 company or will never act like Benedict Cumberbatch. In this way they are radicalised into holding what I would call extreme views about the nature of success and the extreme methods needed to achieve it. They leave school all pumped up, coiled springs of ego.
If they do not reach the very top, they will live ‘wasted’ lives. Tony Little concedes that ‘disproportionately Eton kids don’t tend to go into the public sector’. When Little was headmaster at Eton he noticed that the new generation of boys wanted to be ‘entrepreneurs’. But, he says, ‘in my generation it was much more linear than that, you train as a lawyer, become a judge. There was also a number who wanted to go into social entrepreneurship. Socially useful but running your own business. And that’s a big change.’15
In terms of social contributions, Little says: ‘It didn’t matter whether they lived in a castle or a council house – being at Eton was a huge privilege for any boy. So they absolutely should give something back. I think they took that message and understood it. Quite a lot of twenty-year-olds would seek to do something well remunerated and the social bit kicked in later on. But if you looked at the ten boys in my house you’d be struck by how undistinguished they were. Maybe there’s a public perception to push yourself that much higher now, maybe it ties into the Thatcher’s children point – a general sense that there’s a world out there to grab.’
The ambition of the top public schools for their pupils is impressive, but risks backfiring when those pupils encounter wider society. One Eton pupil in 2016 who had some of the best grades in his year experienced a grilling by a Cambridge admissions don that is becoming more familiar. As he sat down to his interview the tutor began by saying: ‘Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room… Eton has something of a reputation for breeding arrogant, posh young men. What do you think of this?’16 This wariness of the stereotype may be already taking a toll on Eton’s Oxbridge entrance numbers. Of the 260 boys who left Eton in 2015, almost one in four attained places at either Oxford or Cambridge universities. But these figures, while impressive compared to other schools, are the lowest since the school started keeping records.17
The ISC has begun to recognise that the pressure to succeed is sending pupils to university when they might not be best suited to academic life. Barnaby Lenon says schools must stop branding alternatives to university as failure and disgrace: ‘I am sick of not particularly academic students saying they are going off to read English or Psychology – just because they have been told to. We need far better careers advice in schools that doesn’t automatically tell you to read English at Exeter University.’18
*
Unfortunately, public school entitlement is a phenomenon not restricted to English public schools. Our former Empire is littered with establishments which have aped schools like Eton, Harrow and Rugby, instilling the ‘public school personality’ and forging dynastic links among the rich and powerful. This is particularly so in America.
The US private school system mirrors the English one in terms of paying for privilege. It’s just a bit more open about it. American academics Jeanne Ballantine and Floyd M. Hammack have concluded: ‘Those who can afford it go to elite private schools where they pay for the special “status rights” and social networks that allow for the “passage of privilege,” and hope that this will maintain their children’s privileged position or help them obtain a better job.’19
Donald Trump’s private school is a legacy of the English public school system which exported a military system for educating elites.20 Trump was born into a wealthy family. At thirteen years old his parents packed him off to the New York Military Academy (NYMA), spread across 120 acres in rural Cornwall, New York, located 60 miles north of Manhattan. It was founded in 1889 by Civil War veteran and former school teacher Charles Jefferson Wright when English public schools were in their pomp. At the heart of Wright’s vision was a cadet-corps public school which combined the ethos of Eton with the military discipline of Sandhurst. Indeed, the military academy model has played a key role in the schooling of America’s young society gentlemen. Central to its ethos is the building of leadership qualities. Today school fees at NYMA are equivalent to a leading public school in England, around £33,000 a year.21 NYMA’s famous alumni include the Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
When Trump was there in the 1960s it placed great emphasis on discipline and sporting achievement. According to Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire, Donald Trump was ‘in a place where winning really mattered, and he poured himself into doing better than everyone else at everything… He did his best to fit in, once even refusing to let his parents visit unless they left the chauffeur at home.’22
‘He wasn’t that tight with anyone,’ said Ted Levine, Trump’s roommate in their first year at NYMA. ‘People liked him, but he didn’t bond with anyone. I think it was because he was too competitive, and with a friend you don’t always compete.’ By the time Trump was preparing to leave, his senior year roommate, David Smith, said, ‘Donald had a sense of how he wanted to be viewed. He really wanted to be a success. He was already focused on the future, thinking long-term more than present. He used to talk about his dad’s business, how he would use him as a role model but go one step further.’23
Trump was educated at a school where many of the teachers were Second World War veterans and the discipline was tough. But the military Christian ethos of the school was merely perfunctory. Winning was everything and sometimes victory was achieved at all costs. Trump came out on top because he saw himself as a winner (he was 6 feet 2 inches tall and the baseball team captain by the time he left). Today when Trump looks back on his education he likes to focus on the quality of the teaching rather than the sports: ‘I went to an Ivy League school,’ Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally in St Augustine. ‘I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words.’24 It’s easy to recognise the ‘thin-skinned, desperate-to-impress public schoolboy’ in Trump the political leader who remains unable to let a single slight go unanswered. And it was NYMA which shaped his now-familiar attitude towards rules that govern the behaviour of everyone but Donald Trump.
But it seems even he recognises that so many years at a boarding school may have taken its emotional toll. ‘I had very good marks. And I was a good student generally speaking,’ Trump told the Boston Globe of his decision to attend Fordham College for two years after NYMA. ‘But I wanted to be home for a couple of years because I was away for five years. So I wanted to spend time home, get to know my family – when you’re away, you’re away right?’
The billionaire president has entrusted the same private schools with his own children’s education, which he has used to groom the next generation in the Trump dynasty. For his daughter Ivanka, Trump chose the $56,000-a-year Choate Rosemary Hall School in Connecticut where President Kennedy was also educated. His son Barron has been sent to St Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland, where fees are $40,000 per year. His two other children with Ivana, Donald Trump Junior (Buckley School, New York) and Eric (Trinity School, New York), and his daughter by second wife Marla, Tiffany (Viewpoint School, California), all received equally privileged and expensive educations.
The man most credited with influencing Trump the presidential candidate is the product of a very similar education. Steve Bannon, Trump’s trusty campaign director and former Whitehouse chief of staff, spent his formative years at a military academy in Richmond, Virginia called the Benedict College Preparatory. The school mixed monastic life with a strict military prospectus that echoed the Christian morality of the Victorian English public school. Bannon continued his links with the school after leaving in 1971 and served on its board until 2012.25 Both Trump and Bannon have built close links with Britain’s public school Brexit brigade: Nigel Farage and Michael Gove were the first British politicians to be invited to Trump Tower in New York after the presidential election victory. When Bannon came to the UK at the end of November 2017 he held two key meetings: first with Farage; then Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Despite their privileged, private school backgrounds, Trump and Bannon have positioned themselves as outsiders, anti-establishment men of the people. It is the same tactic utilised by Rupert Murdoch, the son of a wealthy colonial family, educated at Geelong Grammar School, the most expensive boarding school in Australia, according to Murdoch’s own Australian newspaper. Geelong, close to Melbourne, was run along traditional public school lines, teaching classics, rowing and rugby. Its most famous alumni include Prince Charles who spent two terms in 1966 at its Timbertop campus in Victoria.
Murdoch has claimed that his sense of being outside the British establishment motivated him to tackle the vested interests of the country’s ruling class. But the media mogul who now commands a dominant and influential position in UK affairs was himself a product of an elite education that drove him to surpass his own father’s achievements in publishing. His anti-establishment credentials are critically undermined by his choice of further education, reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford, where he stood for secretary of the Labour Club and managed Oxford Student Publications Ltd, the publishing house of the university’s student newspaper Cherwell. And, like Trump, Rupert Murdoch has bolstered his own media empire by sending his own children to the world’s top private schools.26 But the arch-exponent of the art of attacking the establishment from within is Nigel Farage. When The Times investigated Farage over his EU allowances, the UKIP politician and his party (crammed full of privately educated MEPs and party officials) denounced the journalists as establishment figures by naming the public schools they attended.27
*
In his book Learning Privilege, the American academic Adam Howard explored the lessons students learn in elite schools about their place in the world, their relationship with others, and who they are. Howard argues that these lessons reinforce and regenerate privilege.28 We have already seen how networks of public schoolboys have a disproportionate influence on the government of this country and the generation of wealth in the City. Nick Duffell says: ‘Since the major path to power in our society – via public school and the glories of Oxbridge – is still desirable and well-trodden, it has been easy for us to normalise this tradition and remain seamlessly accustomed to the entitlement it affords. For the most part our elite fail to recognise the degree and manner of their entitlement; some of today’s politicians appear to believe they have got where they are by hard work alone.’
Do we want to continue with this system for choosing our leaders and those who mould our society and institutions? Nick Duffell doesn’t think so. He argues that the institution of the public school is ‘manifestly unfit for purpose’. Indeed, he believes that ‘British elitism supports an outdated leadership style that is unable to rise above its own interests, perceive the bigger picture and go beyond a familiar, entrenched and unhealthy system of adversarial politics. Such a leadership style is not to be recommended. It may well be dangerous given the demands of the current world in which increasingly problems are communal – indeed global – and in which solutions urgently demand non-polarized cooperation and clear focus on the common good in order to take effect on a worldwide scale.’
This view is supported by Diane Reay, emeritus professor of education at Cambridge University. Reay comes from a working-class coal-mining community and taught at inner-city primary schools for twenty years. She told me: ‘They are making decisions for the rest of us based on a very very slim knowledge base about what the rest of us are like: what our attitudes are, what our values are, what our needs are and how we live our lives. That is deeply problematic… because where you have people who have been segregated from the rest of the community there clearly is a lack of empathy and understanding.’
She says even her own students who had been privately educated betrayed a subconscious misunderstanding of families they had had no contact with. ‘They would conclude that these parents were not caring adequately for their children and “needed to change” or were “bad parents”. I think this comes from a background of where they have had very little experience of the working classes other than the people who service them. They are their cleaners, they are the people who empty their bins.’29
Many years on from serious accusations of amorality both in the curriculum and in the educators themselves, headteachers argue that the schools have evolved and are much more interested in educating the whole child in the context of moral responsibility. Even if this is true, it is little consolation to those of us who are being governed by the previous generation, especially where their unusual upbringing gives them little experience of the way the rest of the country lives, or, worse still, where the qualities that propelled them to leadership are not leadership qualities.