Eton and the masses

Mar 14, 2010

The chasm between David Cameron's background and that of most other people makes his claims of empathy grate.

In the wake of Gordon Brown's interview with Piers Morgan, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, has sought to similarly humanise himself. During an interview with gardening guru Alan Titchmarsh, Dave insisted that attending Eton college didn't affect his understanding of people. It was an utterly risible claim.

That claim in full: "I have never had any trouble relating to people, listening to them, talking to them, understanding other people's lives. I simply do not believe just because you went to a particular school you cannot understand other people."

Cameron Minor, as he would have been called in his early years at Eton (his older brother would have been Cameron Major), has voiced similar opinions before. Yet unless the school embarked on some grand social experiment in the late 1970s, they don't bear much scrutiny

When I attended Eton in the 1990s pupils practised foxhunting on bicycles and went scuba-diving in PE. Some dined annually with the Queen. I made toast for a Saudi royal and shared classes with Prince William. Eton is not simply "a particular school" – it is a peculiar school.

Nor were boys privileged sons with hearts of gold. Despite a gratuitously middle-class upbringing in the home counties, my accent and vocabulary were deemed unacceptable. Use of "toilet" instead of "lavatory", "dinner" rather than "supper" and "garage" pronounced like "marriage" were enough label me a commoner. I learned to answer to "Oi, pleb" until the age of 16 (Eton occupies such a warped reality that even bullying is conducted in Latin).

David Cameron MP for Witney is not, one would hope, the Cameron Minor of Eton, however he conducted himself at school. But what evolutionary miracle allows him now to "relate to" the long-term unemployed, to factory workers, or even to bank clerks?

He may appreciate that the life of a single mother on minimum wage is difficult, but he cannot understand what that life is really like.

This raises the question of whether I and other Old Etonians are similarly incapable of such understanding. I think we are. While the school's pupil intake is more broad-based now than 40 years ago, and while many may care deeply about those less well-off, most alumni lack an adequate frame of reference to really understand lives radically different to their own. In this respect the Tory leader – both born and married into extreme wealth – is surely a case in point.

Of course, it is debatable whether anyone can truly relate to experiences not their own. Perhaps Cameron's claims are no more hollow than any made by other party leaders.

Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly the glaring chasm between Cameron's background and most people's that makes his repeated assertions of empathy so grating. The life story of an accountant will occasionally overlap with that of a plasterer – both may have grown-up in low-income households, or attended state school, or taken a budget package holiday, giving them some shared references. An Eton and Oxford-educated millionaire simply cannot make the same connections.

Ultimately, Cameron has less in common with most people than the majority have with each other.