How politics got 'posh' again

With the resignation of Alan Johnson as Shadow Chancellor, the top flight of British politics just got a little more exclusive.The replacement of Johnson with Ed Balls means that the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Shadow Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister all went to Oxford or Cambridge. With Balls an old boy of fee-paying Nottingham High School, it means that all of them – with the exception of Ed Miliband – were privately educated.

It's hard to argue then with the thesis of a TV programme, Posh and Posher – Why Public Schoolboys Run Britain, to be shown this week. It suggests that meritocracy and social mobility are dead in British political life, largely thanks to the collapse of grammar schools, a collapse supported by both Tory and Labour governments. The first post-grammar-school political generation has ended up being a public-school generation.

From 1964-97, every British Prime Minister, from Harold Wilson to John Major, was grammar-school educated. Gordon Brown was the first university-educated Prime Minister not to go to Oxford or Cambridge. (Although, of course, the public-school, Oxbridge-educated politician never went away during those decades. Dozens of Cabinet ministers, in both parties, were from that background; they just never got the top job.)

But now the tide has well and truly turned; and it looks as if it'll remain that way. If you look at the Coalition, and the new intake of MPs, the probable successors to Cameron and Miliband are likely to come from the same gilt-edged pipeline.

Half of the Cabinet and a third of all MPs went to private school; there are 20 Old Etonians in the Commons, eight of them in the Government. Of the 119 ministers in the Coalition, two thirds were privately educated.

It's not that different on the Opposition benches. A third of Labour's front bench went to Oxford or Cambridge; all the contenders for last year's leadership race went to one of the two universities.

As a public-school and Oxford-educated journalist, I was interviewed by presenter Andrew Neil for the programme. Even though my contribution ended up on the cutting-room floor, it's hard not to agree with Neil's claim that there's been a return to the old order.

The only disagreement I have with this thesis is the suggestion that the revived presence of comfortable backgrounds and useful connections actively excludes those from poorer backgrounds. Of course, connections help, but they can only go so far without intelligence and application.

And there is certainly no snobbish barrier to high politics for those without connections. The idea that there's a new, public-school, Oxbridge mafia at work, conspiring to dominate the reins of power, isn't true. There has been no concerted old boys' stitch-up; there is only one barrier to entry to the political class these days – and that's an intellectual one. The intellectual pipeline to power from poorer families has been snapped off by the disappearance of most grammar schools.

But also gone are the days when a stupid public schoolboy could get on in politics purely through connections. (And there are still plenty of stupid public school boys around; for every David Cameron and Nick Clegg, there are a hundred of their contemporaries still trying to finish their first film script, deal with their addictions and avoid the painful spectre of salaried employment).

The British obsession with class so clouds out all other issues that it's easy to forget quite how unusually academic the new political breed is.

David Cameron is the first Conservative Prime Minister to get a First at Oxford since Sir Robert Peel, 200 years ago; George Osborne was a scholar at Oxford; comprehensive-educated William Hague got a First.

What has really emerged is an intellectual political class, irrespective of party: Ed Miliband (Haverstock Comprehensive, Oxford and a Masters degree at the London School of Economics); David Miliband (also Haverstock Comprehensive, followed by a First at Oxford and a Kennedy Scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Nick Clegg (Cambridge and two Masters degrees, at Minnesota University and the College of Europe in Bruges); and now Ed Balls (a First at Oxford, followed by a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard).

So, yes, it's largely true that public school boys run the country; but that's a secondary reflection of the fact that politics is now a game for the academic elite – and, because of the collapse of grammar schools, that elite is drawn increasingly from public schools.

Oxford and Cambridge have become a sort of top flight, academic finishing school for politicians, like the École Nationale d'Administration in Strasbourg, set up in 1945 by Charles de Gaulle to make access to the senior civil service more democratic.

The École Nationale quickly became a production line for senior politicians across the political spectrum. Among the énarques (the ÉNA graduates) are Jacques Chirac, Giscard d'Estaing and six French prime ministers. And now the same intellectual grooming for high office is going on at Oxbridge.

The wisest contributor to the TV debate is R W Johnson, emeritus fellow in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, who taught both William Hague and Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. "You have a highly selective institution," he says of Magdalen, which has educated more members of the Cabinet (five) than there are women in the Cabinet. "You get very good people; you teach them as hard as you can. It's not that surprising they do well."

In its conclusion, the programme shies away from a return to the 11-plus, thinking the level of selection is too brutal. But brutal selection is the only solution to the decline of meritocracy.

There are few more brutally selective processes than the route to success in the British public school system. First comes the entrance exam to prep school; then streaming, weekly tests and termly exams. Then comes the entrance exam to public school, where there's more streaming, more tests and more exams. University only offers more of the same.

Some people wrongly think that a fat wallet buys you a brilliant public-school education. What it buys you is the guarantee of an OK public-school education; plus the option, if you're clever and hard-working enough, of jumping through all the hoops to get that brilliant education.

People like David Cameron and Ed Balls, with their Oxford Firsts, or Nick Clegg, with his three degrees, won't have just one brutal selection test at the age of 11, like the old grammar school pupils. Between the ages of five and 21, they will have been examined – and brutally selected – more than 60 times, at a conservative estimate. On each occasion, their less successful contemporaries will have been demoted from the scholarship class, or consigned to an inferior school, university or degree.

To establish an elite is a necessarily brutal process; just talk to footballers who don't make the professional grade.

You might think you're being nicer, fairer and more equal by not applying the brutal selective techniques of the old 11-plus to state-educated pupils. But don't then expect them to match the achievements of those who have survived those techniques in the private sector. And the outcome will go on being unfair and unequal – public schoolboys will continue to run the country.

'Posh and Posher – Why Public Schoolboys Run Britain' is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9pm.