Johnson's Eton problem

The prime minister has found that Old Etonians can be just as nasty to each other as they are loyal

The future prime minister captaining his side at the Eton Wall Game in 1982

IT REALLY wasn’t my intention to post about Eton again, but what with Britain’s twentieth Old Etonian prime minister looking like he will soon be out of a job, I thought I would correct a few misconceptions about how Johnson is viewed by the 16,000 men who happened to go to the same school as him.

The truth is that they don’t like him very much.

Yes, yes, I know that my opinion has been reached through anecdote rather than scientific polling, and I’m also aware that it’s quite possible that I have only been speaking to a self-selected group of school friends who share my misgivings about the man, but trying to find an Old Etonian – apart from Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kwasi Kwarteng – with a good word to say about Boris Johnson is really pretty difficult.

If I am right, then what does this tell us?

First, it reveals that Old Etonians, contrary to public opinion, are not a secretive cabal all working towards the same goal. They are neither the Freemasons nor the Mafia, but like any other alumni group, they are bound together to varying extents merely by having been at the same institution for a short period of time.

Some Old Etonians take all the old school stuff very seriously, and some turn their backs on it. Most are somewhere between, and attend the reunions held once every decade, and will regularly see some old school friends just like anybody else.

What being an Old Etonian therefore does not mean is that loyalty to the old school tie – which is seldom worn, incidentally, because it’s considered too much of a show-off – will influence your decisions throughout the rest of your life. While I don’t deny that there is some loyalty, and although I suspect it may be stronger than that of many other alumni groups, it is certainly not paramount.

In fact, Old Etonians can be vicious towards each other. For no better example, simply look at the letter written to the prime minister last week by his fellow Old Etonian Jesse Norman, in which the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire called Johnson’s premiership a ‘charade’.

In my experience, Norman’s views are widely held by many Old Etonians whose dislike both of Johnson’s leadership and his person can be absolutely brutal. Just ask Rory Stewart. There is a strong feeling that by being a bad prime minister, and, in more than a few OE eyes, a bad man, Johnson has let the side down. Notwithstanding Brexit and his subsequent financial shenanigans, David Cameron was felt to have done a reasonable job, and to have done his old school pretty much proud.

Of course, most schools would be happy to even have had one PM, and even a terrible one to boot, and I appreciate that it is hard to envisage a more privileged and First World problem than worrying about how the efficacy of a world leader will impact on the reputation of your alumni group. But when over a third of all British prime ministers have been to your school – and when the head of the British Army, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the second in line to the throne have all been there too – then the bar does get set pretty high.

The fact that his fellow Old Etonians are so withering about Johnson not only suggests that they are not as loyal to each other as many suppose, but it also indicates something that has often been observed about Johnson – that he lacks true friends. It’s clear that throughout his time both at Eton and Oxford, Johnson rubbed people up the wrong way, and even by Etonian standards he seemed to have been more than unusually arrogant.

Had Johnson developed some close and long-lasting friendships at Eton, then I’ve no doubt that some of those relationships might have been of some help to him in his present predicament. I’m not stating that they would have got him out of jail, but they might have made him a better man – and perhaps a better prime minister. As I say, perhaps.

There’s no denying that going to Eton gives you one of the best legs-up in life that anyone could wish, and does indeed provide a very loose network, but as Johnson has found, Etonians, just like Tories, can turn on each other with no mercy whatsoever.