a half boys compete for each of the 260 places on offer.

Although Eton’s internal reforms were well under way by the time Tony Little, Henderson’s predecessor, took over in 2002, this former scholar (an Etonian in the 1960s, he was the first member of his family to be educated over the age of 14) introduced them to a sceptical world. He was “more foreign secretary than home secretary”, as one master recalls, giving interviews and making friends with educational reformers in the Blair government; his railing against the “deadly cloud of class awareness” rates as one of the more unexpected interventions from an Eton headmaster.

Under Little, Eton sponsored a state boarding school up the road in Ascot and a sixth-form college in the London borough of Newham. BursaryKoran. Born in refugee camps in Lebanon, these boys had been flown to Britain for interview. Come September, two of them will be in tails.

Little’s memorial at Eton is a shiny research complex, the donor-funded Tony Little Centre for Innovation and Research in Learning, which joined forces with Harvard to advance research into the adolescent brain – all synaptic pruning and neural pathways. The centre’s mission statement is a slightly laboured attempt to establish Britain’s poshest school as a public good: “we want Eton and the wider UK to be at the forefront of new developments in teaching and learning, for the benefit of all.”

The new Eton – friendly to the international plutocracy while also containing strong elements of political correctness – naturally went down badly with the