Old Etonians don’t care about being liked. That’s why they make good PMs

22 May 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

To the untrained eye, the social gulf that separates David Cameron and Nick Clegg is hard to spot. They are both sons of financiers, both ex-public schoolboys, both the products of elite English universities and both in their early forties. Indeed, when they gave their joint press conference in the Rose Garden last week it was reminiscent of the final scene in A Comedy of Errors in which two twin brothers are reunited after being separated at birth.

However, for those well versed in the manners and habits of the educated bourgeoisie, the differences between them could hardly be more pronounced. Cameron likes to remain aloof, whereas Clegg likes to be the centre of attention; Cameron is inner-directed, while Clegg is outer-directed; Cameron wants to be feared, Clegg wants to be loved. It all boils down to the difference between Eton and Westminster.

As a grammar school boy at Oxford it took me a while to tell the products of these two ancient public schools apart, but eventually I hit upon a method. It was the different way in which they tried to put me at my ease. A typical Old Etonian would make no attempt to conceal his sense of superiority but would talk to me as if I, too, was a member of the same exclusive club. A typical Old Wet, by contrast, would attempt to lower himself to my level, doing everything in his power to dispel any impression I might have that he thought himself superior.

The lengths to which Old Wets would go to appear ‘normal’ were often quite comic. I remember one undergraduate in particular who was so anxious to disguise his privileged upbringing that he spoke in what he imagined was a cockney accent. The trouble is, his only exposure to working-class Londoners was confined to film and stage adaptations of the novels of Charles Dickens. When I first heard him refer to another Old Wet as ‘me old China’, I thought this was an example of the stage cockney that Nancy Mitford and her friends would use as a joke. In fact, he genuinely believed he had the whole world fooled.

1 | 2 Next page