High and mighty: in 2013 Tony Blair’s alma mater Fettes, one of Edinburgh’s top independent schools, was ordered to increase its intake of poorer pupils. Photo: Murdo McLeod.
Something happened near the end of 2013. John Major called “truly shocking” the way that “the upper echelons of power . . . are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class”; the Guardian ran the arresting front-page headline “PM’s despair at private school grip on top jobs”; the Times columnist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris dared David Cameron to seize his Clause Four moment and compel private schools to accept 25 per cent of their intake on a state-funded, means-tested basis; even Nigel Farage of Ukip, analysing the Ashes debacle, declared: “Our Test team, like so many sectors of our public life, are increasingly a reflection of the private education system.”
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