Here’s what it’s like to join the English top flight traditionally: you’re 17 and you’re wearing a new costume. You take the train to Oxford or Cambridge – two centuries-old universities commonly united under the small name of “Oxbridge”. You end up finding the rooms where the tutors. In the good old days, you would have been served a glass of sherry, sherry wine, a drink that you probably had never seen before. Now is the time when you must speak. The tutors, slumped on various sofas, question you in a drawling voice, keeping themselves awake by throwing you on a subject that interests them. I know a candidate for admission who was asked if he did not find that the piazzetta San Marco in Venice is reminiscent of a branch of Barclays bank. This initial interview is actually intended to test your ability to speak brilliantly, even without mastering the subject.
A few days after this conversation, an envelope stamped Oxford or Cambridge arrives on the doormat of your family home. If the letter begins with the formula “We are pleased to inform you that…”, you are inducted into the British elite for life. Throughout history, only a tiny fraction of the 99% of Britons who will never receive this letter succeed in becoming a senior civil servant, judge, investment banker or politician (of the fifteen British prime ministers since 1940, eleven have made their studies at Oxford, three – including Churchill – did not study at university, and Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh, because the Scottish elite take a slightly different path).
small hereditary caste
My new book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK (untranslated), looks at the country’s transformation into an “oxocracy” (Cambridge plays only a secondary role in British politics). I have a certain fascination with the way elites are formed. And I note, after having lived for twenty years in Paris, that the French elite is following a fairly similar path.
Traditionally, the British elite – the English elite, really – has largely come from a small hereditary caste. In the 1980s and 1990s, when members of today’s elite were educated, almost half of Oxbridge students fell into the previously privately educated 7% of the country’s population. And, for the top 1% of Britons who go to private boarding schools, the famous boarding schools, the path to Oxbridge is clear. Former Eton resident Boris Johnson ” integrated » Oxford alongside dozens of former classmates. That said, Oxbridge always strives to recruit the best minds from the lower classes as well, especially if they present themselves in the reassuring guise of white men. To paraphrase Lyndon B. Johnson, these smart men are better off inside the elite tent and pissing out, rather than outside and pissing out. interior. Thus the prime ministers Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were educated at Oxford, while coming from the working classes or the petty bourgeoisie.
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