I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is a cathartic denunciation of the private boarding school system, and his rage is on two fronts. The first is how being sent away at the age of eight damaged and twisted him and just about everyone else who experienced the same; the second is about what these damaged children as adults have done to the country. He pays special attention to the Prime Minister and his predecessor but one.
I suspect that The Spectator has quite a few readers who went to boarding school, and who even think the government is doing a good job. So you may either have given up on this review already or will have no intention of reading the book. But that would be a pity, because you would be missing out on one of the finest polemics I have ever come across.
It is a passionate, well-argued case against a system by which a pool of less than 5 per cent of the population have a disproportionate influence over every significant aspect of our lives. It is also a system which instils in these people dissembling, hypocrisy, snobbery, moral blindness and indifference to anyone else’ssuffering. Think of the Prime Minister’sand Foreign Secretary’s decisions to go on holiday just as Afghanistan was about to be catapulted back to the Middle Ages.
This book clarifies much: the smirking of Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Matt Hancock — they simply don’t care. The reason Johnson is the suboptimal person he is — the kind who refuses to tell us even how many children he has — is because he’s still at school. Even his hair is still at school.
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