Boris and the Spirit of Eton

Boris Johnson, the leader charged with fulfilling the British voters’ mandate to exit the European Union, is well prepared for the task. His prodigious talents were nurtured early at Eton College, the famed bastion of the British establishment. After centuries Eton still reigns at the pinnacle of posh excellence. A graduate reports.

If you’d told somebody in the mid 2000s that David Cameron would become Prime Minister, they would have laughed in your face. If you then told them that a few years later Boris Johnson would be one of his successors, they’d consider you bonkers. This was Blairite Britain – gone were the days of Macmillan, Douglas-Home, and the coterie of other prime ministers educated at that same dusty institution – the hegemony of the Old Etonian was firmly over. Yet Cameron became the 19th Prime Minister educated there, and Boris the 20th, making five out of the fourteen prime ministers elected during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign Old Etonians.

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