Yasmin’s Eye on …. Posh Boys Take Over. Again.

I heard the news, like everyone else, with disbelief. David Cameron, oops, Lord Cameron, is now Foreign Secretary. The new Lord was installed, as if by birthright. The appointments commission was bypassed; Lindsay Doyle, speaker of the house of commons, is vexed. Sunak and Cameron must think they’re above all that. Swanky people disdain rules the rest must follow. Be aware too of old boys’ networks, tribal loyalties and public school hierarchies. Winchester man felt he needed a vain Etonian to prop up his creaking, cracking party. ( FYI The Tatler put Eton at no 3 and Winchester at no 8 in the 2021 private schools chart)

Over 65% of the cabinet ministers chosen by Johnson, Truss and Sunak were privately educated. James Cleverly was, so too Michael Gove, the minister for levelling up, and the Paymaster General John Glen. Those within that circle are acutely aware of the greater and lesser private schools, the most and least prestigious Oxbridge colleges, the posh gene. Previously, in Mrs May’s government, just 30% of those round her table were from public schools. No wonder they got rid of her.   https://www.itv.com/news/2022-10-26/majority-of-rishi-sunaks-new-cabinet-went-to-private-school

Many years ago, Nadine Dorries ( Halewood Comp, Liverpool) and I fell out over a nasty tweet she’d posted about me. My response was sarcastic and, I suppose, to her eyes, brassy. The rest is bad history between us. Yet today, I think she is right to feel aggrieved by the way Sunak ‘the privileged posh boy’- – her words- blocked her peerage. In an interview in the Sunday Times this weekend, her sense of injustice was palpable: ‘Was I worthy of it? I absolutely was worthy’. Imagine her froth and fury when Sunak announced Cameron’s peerage and ministerial appointment on Monday. True, Dorries, who annoys many of us, allegedly neglected her constituents, was seen as a terribly uncultured  Culture Secretary, is still nuts about Boris Johnson, and shouldn’t have employed and paid thousands of pounds of our money to her daughters.

However, unlike Cameron, Dorries has never been accused of turning a functioning Arab nation into a failed state. In 2016, the foreign affairs committee concluded that the then PM, David Cameron, with France and the US, launched a war in Libya with no proper intelligence analysis or defined goal. They toppled  Muammar Gaddafi, and like Blair and Bush in Iraq, lost interest and casually walked away. Obama rightly called it a ‘shitshow’.

Remember too, that just two years ago,  a parliamentary inquiry severely criticized Cameron for  lobbying for a bank in which he held a personal economic interest. In 2020, he’d sent sixty five messages to ministers and top civil servants promoting Greensill Capital, run by Lex Greensill (CBE!) , an Australian tycoon, who had glided his way to the top echelons of British business and political establishments. The bank went bust in 2021. These two are serious misjudgements. One has led to an uncounted number of deaths in Libya, and endemic disorder. Libya, a country with the 10^th largest oil reserves in the world,  once had the highest standard of living in Africa. Today, it’s from this lawless land that many desperate Arabs and Africans board ships to get to Europe. How does a man with such a miserable record get to be our Foreign Secretary? Simple really. He’s a toff. And toffs expect never to be judged. They float upwards. In that, he is like his old foe, fellow Etonian, Boris Johnson.

I had a meeting with Cameron some time in 2010. I had written several books on Britishness, immigration and contemporary Britain. Cameron apparently wanted to learn about all that. He was affable, open and intellectually curious,  yet also incredibly uninformed. His white, moneyed world, in its own way, was a ghetto. Although, like all PMs, he visited temples, black churches and mosques to garner votes, he knew nothing about black or Asian lives or indeed how the nation was changing and the world too. Sunak is intelligent, but like Cameron, living in his own privileged bubble, worlds away from domestic and geopolitical realities.

And now, to tweak that image and project himself as a down to earth man of the people, the PM has created a special role for Esther McVey. Born in Liverpool, she spent her early years in care. Now she, who is properly right wing, gets to be the minister of ‘common sense’ or ‘anti-wokery’. As if that breezy solution will fool voters, especially the red-wallers, who are disillusioned with the Tories. Will she also turn on the posh boys one day? I expect so. But hopefully, by then, we the electorate will have seem them off.