Some newspapers treat some of their columnists as jewels in the crown of their paper. Others are grateful to have people write pieces for them every week. A classic example of the jewel in the crown case is this chap who returned to the Telegraph at the beginning of July just as he left the Cabinet and before he had sought permission to do so from the Parliamentary committee that oversees such matters. However just as his return to the Telegraph is a matter they are proud of, the same paper last Friday posted an article by another well known columnist Charles Moore whose piece began with the headline:

With Etonians shunned in the modern Cabinet, where will the new talent come from 

It seems tough to argue that anyone is shunning Etonians, particularly as Boris chose to leave the Cabinet under his own violation. However the reality is that nowadays Charles Moore and Boris Johnson are less journalists and more people with an opinion that they are happy to write about, a bit like myself as I write every week in the Argus. However Charles wrote on Friday in his article “When Boris Johnson resigned as foreign secretary last month, he accidentally created a small piece of history. His departure means that, for the first time ever, we have a Conservative Cabinet with no Old Etonians in it. Out of (by my count) the 52 British prime ministers, 19 have been Etonians. They began in 1721 with our first, Robert Walpole, and end with our most recently departed, David Cameron.”

It seems hard to argue that either Boris Johnson or David Cameron or indeed Charles’s friend Oliver Letwin who he met when they were both at Eton have the sort of talent we need for running the country. After all it was Oliver who used public money to pay to fix a water pipe under his tennis court and who threw away publicly sensitive documents in a bin in St James Park. One assumes that the one of the people who Charles Moore would like to see enter the Cabinet and perhaps become the next Prime Minister, is Jacob Rees Mogg who like Charles, Boris, David and Oliver went to Eton. As a subtitle to the article which I have not been able to read in full because it is behind a pay wall, comes a quote which is presumably from the article itself which makes the statement

There are good reasons why so many prime ministers were from Eton – while none have come from comprehensives

I guess one good reason why so far there have been no Prime Ministers from Comprehensive Schools is that the schools which were introduced in an experimental format in the 1940’s only became widespread in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and so the only British Prime Minister who is young enough to have gone to a Comprehensive School is David Cameron. Also bearing in mind that Eton is a boys school, this also limits matters. The thing about comprehensive schools which of course Charles Moore would not be aware of is that they do not encourage people to help other ex-comprehensive pupils to get a job, whether in industry or in a political party, just because they went to the same school. Instead they teach us that what counts is not who you know (or where you went to school), but what you know. In other words they promoted the idea of talent being measured, not a concern about where it comes from!

Let us hope as we move forward that the poor quality of the current Government which has been contributed to by Cameron, Johnson and Letwin is replaced by good quality Ministers who are from a range of backgrounds. It may of course have a negative impact on the value of sending ones son to Eton, but that is probably long overdue!