Posh Boys by Robert Verkaik, Oneworld, 400pp, £16.99
In the first few pages of Posh Boys, Robert Verkaik manages, among other things, to give public schools a heavy dusting of Nazism-by-association (on the grounds that some of the German high command prematurely fantasised about sending their offspring to Eton); to populate them with people called Tarquin and Humphrey; and to blame them for producing the politicians who sent Britain “crashing out of Europe”.
Crikey, as Tarquin himself might exclaim – if, that is, you can find him. I have lived in England for 28 years and I’ve met countless former public schoolboys, but I have yet to come across the ubiquitous Tarquin. I’ve met lots of Toms, Matts and Nicks, though; and among the ranks of privately educated Tory MPs (including two Old Etonians) one can find Kwasi, Nadhim, Rishi and Bim. But no Tarquin. Mysterious.
Anyway, having been raised in Ireland to be suspicious of the English ruling classes, and in full knowledge of the disasters that befell our country under British rule, I should perhaps have been sympathetic to Verkaik’s horrible history. But the problem with Posh Boys is that, while it is in several respects a very useful primer on the manifest imbalances the public school system has caused in British society, too often fiery polemic overturns rational analysis.
So, for instance, the dissection of David Cameron’s chumocracy, his “meteoric rise and padded fall”, is cleverly done: informative, amusing and dispiriting. Verkaik allows the various actors to take the stage with simply the name of their old school announced sotto voce in brackets – “Osborne (St Paul’s)”; “Clegg (Westminster)” etc – creating a procession that tells its own story. Equally, he convincingly dissects the ways in which public schools wriggle uncomfortably on the hooks created by the stated purposes of their founders, while playing the education market at home and abroad, and exploiting their status as charities within the tax system. It is blistering stuff that should make the posh boys squirm.
But too often Verkaik gets carried away by his own righteousness, causing the reader to doubt the reliability of the rest of what he is telling us. For example, “the whole story of Brexit can be told without reference to anyone educated in the state sector”, apparently. But, on the Leave side alone, Gove was state-educated until he won a scholarship to an independent secondary school, while Gisela Stuart, who chaired the Vote Leave campaign, was state-educated in Germany. David Davis, the former Brexit Secretary, went to state schools, as did Dominic Raab, the current Brexit Secretary. Ditto Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom and Frank Field. Aaron Banks, following his expulsion from boarding school, seems to have gone to a state school (from which he was also expelled). So Verkaik’s claim is a nonsense, one that ignores facts at his and everyone else’s fingertips.
I could go on. However, there is something more fundamental than just eruptions of flagrant partisanship that irritated me about Posh Boys. Verkaik’s essential premise is that parents send their children to public schools because they want them to be posh and rich, as they themselves are or would like to have been; and that the schools themselves bend over backwards to accommodate these desires. There is much truth in this, of course, but the thought that some parents might also have other nobler or more complex motives appears never to have entered the author’s head.
As one would hope, Verkaik has uncovered some juicy facts. Did you know that Eton College employs 981 staff, of whom only 188 are teachers? Or that Paul Weller of The Jam (who wrote Eton Rifles) sent all five of his children to public schools?
Catholic independent schools, it should be said, do not greatly trouble the surface of Posh Boys. Ampleforth probably features most, though there is only the briefest of references to safeguarding. St Joseph’s in Ipswich is mentioned because Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell spent two years there when he was a potential applicant to the priesthood. Worth earns a reference as the alma mater of Andrew Murray, described as the hard left’s Steve Bannon and another ally of prep-and-grammar-schooled Jeremy Corbyn.
Verkaik closes by calling for the dissolution of public schools. Again, he undermines his own case: first, by appearing to place the blame for every facet of the dystopia of modern Britain (the one that people from other parts of the world risk everything to try and reach) at the door of the public schools; and, secondly, by not giving much thought to the consequences.
Imagine all that freed up income being spent on books, computers, clubs, holidays, tutors, houses in the catchment areas of high-performing state schools. Privilege would continue to be rife, but it would become a lot harder to point at and measure. Not such a brave new world, perhaps?
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