How many etonians in government

Gove is the first Conservative education minister to send his child to a state secondary school , and has made it his stated mission to extend opportunities by trying to raise the standard of education through academies and free schools. Cameron himself went to Eton, and the many Old Etonians in his inner circle include 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.

Gove has recently been exposed briefing against Boris Johnson at a dinner with Rupert Murdoch. It is increasingly likely that Johnson, currently London mayor, will find a Conservative seat in time for the election, so he would be able to stand for the Conservative leadership if Cameron stands aside after defeat.

Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? View offers. The book is his contribution to an "exploration of race and class" in Britain, on the grounds that "to understand where we are going as a society, we need to understand how we got here. A striking fact in One of Them is that Okwonga was not sent to Eton by a family hungry to give him a leg up: instead, he urged his mother to send him after seeing it on a TV documentary and visiting on a school trip. Musa Okwonga's Eton memoir One of Them recalls his time as one of only a handful of black pupils at the school in the s Credit: Michel Rosenberg.

The determination Okwonga showed is a quality we see in the old boys who have climbed the greasy pole of politics: "No one here ever tells us out loud that Etonians are natural leaders, " he writes.

But the stories that add flavour to the facts are often from fiction; though given the literary world's scepticism of material success failure is more interesting , a novelist's portrayal of Eton boys can be unflattering — or worse.

Take that amiable idiot Bertie Wooster, whose status as an old Etonian is classic PG Wodehouse : affectionate rather than cutting. We wouldn't have a fellow like that at Eton.

His education is revealed late in JM Barrie's play when Hook jumps toward death-by-crocodile, murmuring " Floreat Etona " "May Eton flourish" , the school motto. Hook was, according to a Provost at the school in , "a great Etonian but not a good one", and in a speech given at Eton that year, Barrie wryly noted that "perhaps it was just that at Oxford he fell among bad companions — Harrovians.

Back in the real life of Eton, villains and fools in Okwonga's memoir are rare: One of Them is a nuanced portrait of his school years, and although "there were no more than about four black boys out of 1, students, the entire time I was there", Okwonga experienced "not too much" overt racism.

On one level this looks like an advance on 30 years earlier, when Nigerian author Dillibe Onyeama suffered racist taunts as the first black student to complete studies at the school, which he reported in his memoir. Writing about these attacks got Onyeama banned from returning to Eton until recently. The racism Okwonga experienced was secondary, but no less insidious for that. One boy "joked" about his great-grandfather, a slave-driver, owning Africans; another told him, later, "you have no idea what was being said behind your back about black people.

It was so bizarre to him that a middle-class black boy could go to Eton. After Onyeama's book and before Okwonga's, the most prominent memoir of Eton was Stand Before Your God , by the novelist Paul Watkins, the author of 18 books including the Inspector Pekkala series written under the name Sam Eastland. His memoir is a funny and dramatic account of the experiences of a young American trying to come to grips with a new life in a new country, after being dropped off by his parents at boarding school when "I swear, I thought I was going to a party.

Watkins, whose skin colour fitted in but who still found that others "slotted me into a file that said Foreigner", had been signed up for the school at the age of six months.

He writes that "you had to have a coldness in yourself" to avoid being hurt. This is no doubt one of the reasons that Etonians have been in every great office of state. The ability to take a risk delivers you to power, but what real risk did any of these people actually take?

No personal risk at all. It is our lives they have used as collateral and, as much as Eton pushes boldness to go for jobs, it often delivers us calamity: most recently, failing councils unable to care for vulnerable children and a police force no longer able to stem the flow of blood on our streets. It is not the sons of Etonians left with a knife at their throat and a gun in their back. The reason state school kids take fewer risks is because they have been educated in consequences.

The article trips through all the prime ministers educated in both the private sector and grammar schools, with only Jim Callaghan attending a non-selective state secondary.