The establishment I entered in the spring of 1985 looked to me like the embodiment of continuity, but across the country, the mood was turning hostile. The immediate post-war period had witnessed three Etonian prime ministers in succession (one of whom, Harold Macmillan, named no fewer than 35 OES to serve in his government), but the squall of egalitarianism in the late 1960s, aggravated in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher’s ethos of self-help and aspiration, loosened the school’s grip on power. In 1990, when Thatcher lost the Tory-party leadership, Douglas Hurd, who stood to succeed her, found his Eton background being used against him. “I thought I was running for leadership of the Conservative Party,” he complained, “not some demented Marxist sect.” Hurd lost the election – andwas in nappies.

In 1990 the Eton List was abolished and a decade later a uniform entrance test and interview were introduced for all would-be entrants at the age of 11, under which the children of OES enjoyed no head start over the sons of people who had not been privately educated, or, for that matter, the offspring of successful Pakistani immigrants or Malaysian electronic-chip manufacturers. In time the tests got harder, the yearly intake cleverer, and the dim, idle viscounts were turned away. (Clever, industrious viscounts continued to get in.) Aided by its proximity to London, whose attractiveness as a safe deposit box for the super-wealthy was on the rise, the school became heavily oversubscribed. (In the 1950s the school had empty places.) Each year, around five and