I had a feeling I couldn’t immediately place. I wanted to go out but wasn’t allowed. Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket, and instead of fresh fruit and vegetables, I was eating British comfort food – sausages and mash, pie, and beans. My freedom to make decisions like an adult was limited. I wondered when I’d see my mum again.
March 2020, the first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. This wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis, my generation of boarding school boys found themselves in charge. My first night at Pinewood school was two days after my eighth birthday in January 1975. A term earlier, David Cameron had left his family home for Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. In 1975, at the age of 11, Alexander Johnson was sent to board at Ashdown House in East Sussex. This means I know how two of the last three British prime ministers were treated like children and the kind of men their schools wanted to make of them. I know neither of these men personally, but I do know that they spent the formative years of their childhood in boarding schools being looked after by adults who didn’t love them because I did too. And if the character of our leader matters, then I have important information.
At the age of 13, after prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to Radley College near Oxford. The parents' exact school didn’t really matter because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset. They were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. We were being trained for leadership, or if not to lead, then to earn. The most convincing reason to go to a private school remains to have gone to a private school, with the prizes that are statistically likely to follow. I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken Cameron, Johnson, and I absorbed attitudes once familiar to Orwell, who was confronted with some realities about his Eton education when documenting the living conditions of working-class households in Lancashire and Yorkshire. “Common people seemed almost sub-human,” Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier. “They had coarse faces, hideous accents, and gross manners… and if they got half the chance, they would insult you in brutal ways.” Alien and dangerous, the working class evoked “an attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred.”
Anyone underestimating the durability of this divide should consider the evidence of the Radley College swimming pool, circa 1980. A story circulated that the pool was a yard shorter than a standard pool so that no local swimming club would want to use it for practice or competitive events. Christopher Hibbert’s history of Radley, No Ordinary Place, corrects this myth: the pool was deliberately designed a yard longer. The same reasoning applied. The locals shouldn’t be encouraged. Typically, in a summer term ending in early July, we didn’t swim in it much anyway.
In the early 80s, Radley’s non-teaching staff were known as College Servants. We had cleaners, chefs, groundsmen, bit-part players, and comic mechanicals. They represented the proles, the plebs, the oiks, the yokels, the townies, and the crusties (a term Johnson continued to use 40 years later). Our special language had its range of words to set these unfamiliar animals apart, meaning people not like us, and if you didn’t know the language, you were probably one of them. As Orwell doubles-down in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The proles are not human beings.
n his autobiography, For the Record, David Cameron admits that about Brexit, he “did not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both during the referendum and afterward.” Of course, he didn’t. Strong feelings were involved, and also the common people. He was floundering in a pair of blind spots to emotion and the British public. He gorged on a double helping of ignorance undisturbed since his schooldays..”y.
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