The headmaster of Eton, Tony Little, turns to me, opens his arms expansively and lowers his well-modulated voice. “This is the one place where you can say that all Etonians have been,” he says. We are in Eton College Chapel and suddenly, on this grey, becalmed spring morning, it feels as if you have wandered into a place of great beauty but also ghosts. You sense, or imagine you do, something of the presence of all those boys who have gathered here before you, century after long century, in what has become the grandest and best-known boarding school in the world (basic annual fees: £32,067).
“Ritual and tradition are very important to us,” Little said to me earlier as we walked from his office to the chapel across School Yard, pausing to look at a statue of Henry VI (“he was not a very good king”), who founded Eton in 1440 as an institution to educate 70 poor boys. The headmaster is tall and straightbacked and has a neatly clipped grey moustache and unfussy spectacles. He is courteous and has the appearance and manner of a colonial administrator. The office adjacent to his belongs to the Provost of Eton, who just happens to be the former Conservative MP and life peer William Waldegrave. David Cameron has an office next to the Provost’s. All right, I made that last one up but the joke doing the rounds at Westminster is that it is only a matter of time before the Prime Minister opens a policy unit at his old school. Perhaps he already has.
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