Why do private schools produce such disastrous governments?

He’s like a particularly irritating cartoon character who keeps surviving in improbable circumstances. There must be a lot of Tory MPs and a few former girlfriends who wouldn’t mind seeing him fired into the sunset out of a circus cannon, but he’d still stumble back grinning, blonde hair singed, telling anyone who would listen that he’d “got the big calls right” (he didn’t).

Boris Johnson has moved on from his ignominious departure from office with barely a backwards glance. He is facing a parliamentary privileges committee inquiry into whether he misled parliament over Downing Street parties, but we already know how disdainful he is of criticism.

Rebecca McQuillan: Nicola Sturgeon, impressive for so long, has lost her way

We’ve just passed the third anniversary of Brexit with significant benefits so far amounting to precisely zero. With the public suffering chronic buyer’s remorse, the chief salesman’s lack of contrition – or even a sense that he finds Brexit interesting anymore – is quite breathtaking.

It makes you wonder yet again: how on earth did someone so reckless ever become Prime Minister?

But then we’ve been here before, haven’t we? David Cameron, a more honourable man than Johnson, was also willing to gamble with people’s best interests. After a pitiless austerity programme, he launched a reckless referendum on the UK’s EU membership to settle internal squabbling in the Tory party, only to go and lose it. He promptly resigned, leaving others to sort out the huge great crater he’d blown in the UK’s economy.

And it happened yet again last year, when Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, backed by Prime Minister Liz Truss, published a mini-budget so wildly ideological and divorced from contemporary reality that it sent the pound and gilt prices plummeting and drove up mortgage interest rates, before the deluded pair finally had their fingers prised off the levers of power.

What do Johnson, Cameron and Kwarteng have in common, apart from the obvious? Well for one thing, they all went to Eton College.

Prime Ministers, world leaders, entertainment stars and generations of the aristocracy have been educated at Eton College (Image: Newsquest)

What can we draw from this? Clearly the school does more than produce dodgy political leaders. Actors Damien Lewis and Hugh Laurie, the singer Frank Turner, former Tory minister Rory Stewart and many others are blameless in all this mess.

Even so, there is no escaping Eton’s association with some of Britain’s worst recent leaders. The social cohesion of the country, its economic strength and international standing have all been damaged by Brexit, the divisive campaign that preceded it and the Trussonomics experiment that followed.

Cameron opened the door to Brexit, Johnson made it happen (prominently abetted by fellow Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg) and Kwarteng conducted an astounding failed experiment with the economy in its feverish aftermath.

Miserably, an elite education still provides a fast-track to the top in politics. What all this suggests is that it is not always much good at equipping those privileged individuals with the qualities needed to be good, admirable, responsible politicians.

What we do know is that elite education breeds a sense of entitlement. If ropey judgment and irresponsible behaviour seem to be repeating themes among the pampered few, then perhaps that is because they typically live lives far removed from most people’s reality and share a sense that risks can be taken at minimal personal cost.

Members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, full of male alumni of the leading public schools (including Johnson and Cameron at one time), would famously smash up restaurants and have it limit their social and career progression not one jot.

Powerful networks of old boys and girls help the newbies on their gilded career paths and reinforce the notion of their essential difference from others.

Rebecca McQuillan: Forget Tories – 2023 will be about battle between Labour and SNP

That the historic public schools like Eton still hold such sway over British society is symbolic of Britain’s failure to sustain real social mobility. There are over 4000 state secondary schools in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (and hundreds more private schools), but two out of the last five Prime Ministers went to Eton, five out of 17 postwar Prime Ministers and 20 out of 57 overall. Seven went to Harrow, six to Westminster, and two to Winchester (including our current PM).

We should not be surprised when a system designed to give the wealthy unfair social and educational advantage, produces politicians who wish to preserve elitism, and behave exactly as they please.

Could it be because of his privilege and entitlement that Johnson, aided by then attorney general Sir Geoffrey Cox (King’s College school, Somerset), suspended parliament when it wouldn’t let him do exactly what he wanted, only for the courts to judge it unlawful?

Or that Johnson aided by Rees-Mogg sought to change parliamentary standards procedures after his friend Owen Paterson (Radley) was found to have broken Commons rules on paid advocacy? Or that Johnson thought he could shrug off the lockdown parties?

“They think the rules don’t apply to them,” said Sir Keir Starmer. It wasn’t a slogan but a statement of fact.

The issue here is that the most exclusive schools, rather than all private schools, still have such ongoing reach. Still, the more ministers that are independently educated at all, the less reflective of society government becomes. According to the Sutton Trust social mobility charity, 61 per cent of Rishi Sunak’s first cabinet went to independent schools.

Comparing the first cabinets of all Prime Ministers since the war, 73 per cent of Tory ministers have been privately schooled, on average, compared to 31.5 per cent of Labour ministers (only Theresa May bucked the Tory trend with 30 per cent). Twenty per cent of the current Scottish cabinet (Humza Yousaf and Mairi Gougeon) spent their high school years at private schools, while Kate Forbes spent some time at a fee-paying school in India.

Rebecca McQuillan: Sunak is no break with the past – he’s Cameron Mark II

None achieve parity with the population but it’s pretty clear where the main issue lies. The Conservative leadership laughably fought the last election on an anti-elitism ticket while being run by shameless elitists.

The truly extraordinary thing is not that elite public schools produce people who are ill-equipped to be good leaders, but that so many voters continually back politicians whose life experience leaves them struggling to relate to ordinary people.