When Eton College recently announced that Sir Nicholas Coleridge would be its new provost, it made news in Britain’s Conservative press. The provost runs the administration of the 580-year-old school, and it’s he who faces the pressure from parents of prospective students for admission to its $53,416-a-year curriculum. There is an entrance exam, but never enough places. Eton is woven deep into the fabric of the British ruling class, so it’s the provost, too, who has to wrangle the tribes of Old Etonians with assumed proprietary rights to the school.
Coleridge, who will take up his position in September 2024, is quite unlike the present incumbent, Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, the multiple-prize-winning scholar, classicist, fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University, and former government minister. Provosts have traditionally been scholars or diplomats, statesmen or courtiers. Coleridge is different. After Eton and Cambridge, Coleridge’s long and successful career was in the media. His autobiography The Glossy Years describes the 30 years he worked for the Condé Nast media empire, finally as the managing director of Condé Nast Britain and president of Condé Nast International. One reviewer wrote, “The names never stop dropping in The Glossy Years. From Roman Abramovich to Catherine Zeta-Jones, from Adrenalin Village [a London club] and Babington House [part of the Soho House empire] to [restaurants] Wiltons and the Wolseley.”
The Daily Telegraph said that Coleridge’s appointment would “restore the ideological balance” at Eton. “Campaigners” had been complaining, the paper said, that the boys were being indoctrinated by an “aggressively woke political agenda” under the current headmaster, Simon Henderson.
It turned out to be a feud led by a group of reactionary O.E. (Old Etonian) parents, aided by the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, against Henderson—whom they’d nicknamed “Trendy Hendy”—for introducing discussions about gender identity and hiring a “Director of Inclusion Education.” Most parents supported him, but the headlines stuck. In my time at Eton, the early 60s, the parents had similarly nicknamed the venerable headmaster, Robert Birley, “Red Robert” for some mildly liberal remarks about apartheid.
It’s not just teaching excellence that parents are seeking but also the massive networking benefits that Eton confers. The former mercenary and Old Etonian Simon Mann, who was jailed for three years in Zimbabwe and nearly two more in Equatorial Guinea for his part in an attempted coup in the latter, expressed it succinctly while publicizing a new business venture in October. “What I offer is my network: the army—soldiers end up in all sorts of funny places—bankers, lawyers, accountants. Then there’s the whole Etonian network, White’s [the gentleman’s club]. I can get to a surprising number of people. They will open the door.”
He’s right. The positions occupied by Old Etonians in the last five years or so include two prime ministerships, held by David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and the editorships at The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, whose headlines set the government agenda. There’s the chairman of the Conservative Party; the head of the powerful Centre for Policy Studies; the leader of the House of Commons; many M.P.’s, including former chancellors of the Exchequer; senior judges and lawyers; and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of the 57 prime ministers since Sir Robert Walpole—he was the first, in 1721—20 have been Old Etonians. In other words, they’ve had it sewn up.
Even Waldegrave has said Eton is too narrow an entry route into politics for too many people. The problem with climbing the “greasy pole” of success, he said, is that “when they get to the top they are not quite sure what it’s for.”
Power, pure and simple, in the case of the Conservative Party. At Eton it’s more than a hint that the walls of Upper School, the long, 18th-century schoolroom with high windows where the Eton Debating Society meets, are lined with the busts of former prime ministers.
All of which has long exasperated those who have watched Old Etonians’ highly visible contribution to the mismanagement of Britain in recent years, especially under Cameron and Johnson. In 2018, the writer John le Carré, who taught at Eton briefly before joining M.I.5 in the 1950s, laid the blame for Boris Johnson, then the foreign secretary, on the school itself, declaring Etonians to be “an absolute curse on the earth, leaving that school with a sense of entitlement and overeducated cultural posturing perfectly encapsulated in our appalling former foreign secretary.”
The Eton Mind
The announcement of Coleridge’s appointment went a little off-message when The Daily Telegraph quoted some remarks he had made in Eton Voices, a book of interviews about the school, to show “how the school he loves, and will soon lead, shaped him.” Coleridge explained that when meeting someone for the first time, if “it emerges that they were at Eton, I feel an interest in them that is multiplied by at least 10. There are certain people who weren’t there, and I do admit that in some strange and awful way I think, ‘Now, why weren’t they?,’ and that it counts against them slightly.”
Eton put out a statement saying the comments had been made in 1988 and “do not represent his views.” But I picked up a clue to the Etonian character of that era from something he wrote.
Coleridge had contributed to the school newspaper, The Chronicle, during his time at Eton. “[It] used to be written largely in Greek on yellow pages,” he recalled, “went tabloid while I was there … and became facetious and topical.” “Facetious” is key. Rather than using it in the usual derogatory manner, Coleridge here suggests it was an admirable editorial style to take. It means “not serious in an attempt to be funny or to appear clever.”
Craig Brown, billed as “Britain’s funniest satirist,” was in the same house at Eton as his friend Coleridge. He was once asked, “Why do so many British satirists come from private schools?” “If you go to boarding school young, [you] become emotionally detached,” he replied. “Facetious and detached” is an accurate description of Etonians I knew, and as Brown hints, it disguises a malaise.
“An absolute curse on the earth.”
The road to Eton, for the most part, starts in private boarding schools—known as “prep schools”—at the age of seven or eight. There the children were detached, suddenly, from everything they knew at home, and consigned to the care of strangers, some of whom, as evidence increasingly shows, were pedophiles. (My own anecdotal evidence records barely a boarding school without one, including my own. Just on Friday, a former Eton schoolmaster was charged with committing 14 counts of sexual offenses against a student when he was employed at the school between 2010 and 2012.)
The one essential for a child’s healthy growth is the certainty of affection. If this affection is removed, if the child is abandoned—which many children at British prep schools feel without being conscious of it—they mutate and develop a false survival persona to fit in and to gain acceptance and approval within those loveless institutions. Nobody knew this at the time. Mothers cried at the train station. The children never came back quite the same, whether they or their family noticed it. The damage appeared later.
With this psychological preparation, or perhaps mutilation, they arrived at Eton at the age of 12 or 13 to a school that, in my day, was fundamentally unchanged from the days of George Orwell and Cyril Connolly in 1918. Until the mid-1980s, beatings were delivered by boys—not schoolmasters, except for the headmasters, and there was also “fagging,” where junior boys were used as servants by the older ones, ordered to cook their fried eggs, light their coal fires, or take messages.
The fearsome power of older boys. The younger boys who became fearsome in turn and joined the bullies. Early on you learned to lie, for survival, in order to escape the often capricious beatings given by boys not much older than you. I remember when I told my first whopper in order to face down the senior boy who I knew had no evidence of my misdemeanor. I felt I’d become a man when I got away with it.
Later on, when I saw Old Etonians on television, such as Boris Johnson or Jonathan Aitken, a government minister who went to jail for perjury, I recognized the skills. A master class was provided by Alexander Nix, of Cambridge Analytica, the company involved in skewing hundreds of elections worldwide. Nix lied day after day about the nature of his Orwellian, data-harvesting work, prompting a member of the House of Commons select committee to tell him, “Everything you say is a pack of lies.” Lying became a style for these kinds of boys, not a moral choice. You might even add the words “I promise you” to the lie, as a joke. It was code, to show that you were gaming the truth.
“We used to have agents of influence during the Cold War, writing our propaganda in newspapers,” le Carré told The Sunday Times. “Now we’re dealing with Cambridge Analytica. At the centre of it all, amorality and, needless to say, Old Etonians.” There’s always an Etonian at the top of “the Circus,” the fictional M.I.6 of his novels, and in the film and TV adaptations they wear their Old Etonian ties.
What was the particular quality le Carré gave these spies? To be able to dissemble, says his character George Smiley, to disguise their feelings, to charm, to cover their tracks. A friend who was at Eton in the 1980s, shortly after Boris Johnson was there, echoed le Carré when he wrote that to survive at the school a boy had to develop a highly tuned “strategic personality” to replace his true nature. It was the only way to have any chance of an identity within the school. He and most of his friends, he said, found some way out of this, through work or art or some passion that reconnected them with their true selves. But the child who wants power from early on will start with this fake personality and later have no reason to shake it off.
Eton, until the 1980s, was a two-layer cake. On the top were some legendary and inspiring schoolmasters, for those who wanted to learn. In the layer below, the boys were, to a large extent, self-governing, in a separate world of hierarchies. Their ranks were dominated by “Pop,” an all-powerful, self-electing oligarchy whose members could beat any pupil they liked in the school, wear colored waistcoats and sponge-bag trousers (striped, formal-gray trousers), and have rule-breaking privileges.
The way to this magnificent pinnacle of power was a greasy pole: you were elected by popularity, so you had to cultivate your overlords via your strategic personality. It was called “oiling for Pop.” The noncombatants always recognized it and often despised it. This was the corrupting system that Cyril Connolly described when he wrote that success at the school required social sense and “moral cowardice.”
Early on you learned to lie, for survival, in order to escape the often capricious beatings given by boys not much older than you.
It’s the bad ones who get the headlines. Eton has also produced great intellectuals, writers, poets, and athletes, as well as legions of financiers and the heir to the throne, Prince William. There are filmmakers and musicians who developed their talents with Eton’s extensive facilities and teaching talent. And actors beyond a reasonable quota: Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, Damian Lewis, Eddie Redmayne, and Tom Hiddleston, to name a few.
In poetry, there is the celebrated Hugo Williams, who lived, he said, “in the shadows” at Eton and certainly a long way from Pop. He was good-looking, which may have been a curse. I never heard of actual sex between the boys at Eton, but as Williams’s poem “A Boy Call” suggests, it buzzed with homoerotic static. In the poem Williams waits while a member of Pop scribbles a note for him to take to a boy in another house, then discovers the note refers to his own desirability.
As soon as I am out of sight
I unfold the note and read,
‘What do you think of this one?
Get him to do the Charleston.’
Corruption breeds corruption. Beating corrupts the beater. All of us saw how it was abused, but it was normal. In British culture, then as now, we reflexively protected the institution and discredited the evidence.
It was Waldegrave, the soon-to-be former provost, who first campaigned against beatings at Eton when he was a schoolboy there. Captain of his house, he refused to beat any boy. In a renowned 1965 school debate, he proposed a motion that beating should be banned, and, sensationally, lost by only a few votes. Ultimately, the bullied wanted to protect their own bullying rights. This was at a time when the headmaster Anthony Chenevix-Trench—later exposed by the writer Alex Renton as a sadist and pedophile—was caning boys, left and right, often on their bare buttocks. Everybody knew about it. Boys had complained. After he left Eton, he went on to other schools.
Atop the Greasy Pole
One schoolmaster at Eton told me there had been a definite shift among the boys in the 1980s and 1990s, an increased arrogance he hadn’t seen before, “a view that rules were only for little people.” I remember, too, the kind of swagger that went with the flood of money into the City—London’s financial center—after the deregulation in the late 1970s, under Margaret Thatcher. I recall the public-school boys, mostly Old Etonians, flaunting it in the pages of glossy magazines such as Tatler. That arrogance continued into Conservative Party politics as the likes of Johnson decided it was O.K. to ride roughshod over long-standing conventions in a country without a written constitution. Rules were for little people.
We saw it next in Brexit. Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, said in October of this year, “If you think about the UK—the UK was the one that started the high level populism through Brexit and then the populism here led to Donald Trump being president.” James Wood, the former editor of the New Republic, who left Eton in 1984, wrote of Brexit as “a madness casually instituted, secretly engineered and noisily bolstered by a cabal of old Etonians born between 1962 and 1975.”
A pupil at Eton in the late 1980s tells me that Jimmy Goldsmith, the financier and politician, “was a great hero when I was there. He was revered and worshipped. Everybody had a copy of his biography Tycoon. He was the buccaneering, rule-breaking rebel, who’d left Eton after winning big on the horses, and now had a private jet and a ranch in Mexico.” Goldsmith was soon to start his Eurosceptic Referendum Party. That led to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the harder-right populist party financed by Old Etonian businessman Stuart Wheeler, who brought in Nigel Farage—the architect of Brexit—to lead it.
Corruption breeds corruption. Beating corrupts the beater.
Other O.E. Brexiteers included Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of a former editor of The Times of London, an affected, almost Edwardian character. “There were always characters like Rees-Mogg at Eton,” one of his contemporaries tells me. “But one never took them seriously.” There was Zac Goldsmith—son of Jimmy—and Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor who produced Liz Truss’s catastrophic budget in 2022. (He had won a scholarship to Eton, and became the first Black member of the gentleman’s club Whites.) Providing support was Cambridge Analytica, naturally, and its parent company, SCL, founded by Old Etonians Nigel Oakes and Alex Oakes, who went on to run election campaigns for Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. It was the old game, like the elections to Pop.
Beatings ended in the mid-1980s, and Pop, whose corrupting power was finally recognized, is now appointed by the schoolmasters with nominations from the boys. Indeed, the entire culture at Eton is transformed from the last century. Boys are on social media with families and friends, and are surrounded with mental-health and well-being services. Parents with boys there tell me they’re much nicer than they used to be. Members of Pop now act as ambassadors for the school, rather than ruling over it as feudal lords.
But animosity toward Eton still exists. This largely stems from the unshifting unfairness of its advantages. The state-funded school system, which “fails on all measures,” according to the recent Times Education Commission report, holds back less advantaged young people from getting into good universities, however bright they are.
Waldegrave will be remembered as the provost who first tried to seriously plug this gap. He’s using Eton’s considerable wealth to set up new schools for promising pupils from deprived areas to help them get into university. Out of Eton’s 1,300 boys, 400 get either grants toward their fees or free education, which has radically diversified its intake.
No one has managed to tear Eton down yet, though many would like to. The Labour Party, which looks likely to win the next election, has long sought to remove charitable status from fee-paying schools, but has since pulled back from that stance. They now aim to put V.A.T. (a 20 percent value-added tax) on fees, which will make all schools and universities more expensive. The state-run schools will fill up, private schools will fold, but Eton will no doubt sail on into a glossy future under its new provost.
James Fox is a London-based journalist, author, and a co-author of Keith Richards’s memoir, Life, and David Bailey’s memoir, Look Again
