SerpApi.Org
Thanks to Andy Burnham, Etonians are making a comeback. Or rather an OE will be attending a Labour Cabinet for the first time since Frank Pakenham, the seventh Earl of Longford, stepped down from the first Harold Wilson government in 1968.
Admittedly Burnham’s Etonian has a very different background from Wilson’s. Longford’s childhood home, or at least one of them, was the family’s Tullynally Castle, among the largest in Ireland. Kanishka Narayan – the Minister for Artificial Intelligence who is newly attending Cabinet – grew up sleeping on the living room floor of a “tiny one-bedroom place” in Cardiff.
Narayan won a full scholarship to Eton; it was here that he first enjoyed his own bedroom. His experience is not unique; according to the school’s latest accounts, 89 boys had a fully free place in 2024-25. Other beneficiaries of full bursaries to Eton include the billionaire hedge-fund manager Chris Rokos, the son of Cypriot immigrants. Rokos is now using part of his wealth to endow places to give other boys like him similar opportunities.
Narayan is part of a select club, Labour OE MPs, that many wrongly assumed had become extinct with the death of Mark Fisher last year. Fisher, who served as the non-Cabinet arts minister at the start of the Blair government, was a more traditional OE, son of an OE Tory MP and an Earl’s daughter.
Tam Dalyell – a castle-dwelling, Thatcher-bating OE member of the far-Left Socialist Campaign Group – survived in Parliament into this century. Perhaps the trenchant-ness of Dalyell’s socialism, like that of Westminster School-educated Tony Benn, was partly a consequence of him constantly trying to prove his hostility to his own class interests.
It is not just Labour governments where Etonians are an endangered species. When David Cameron became PM in 2010, the first OE premier since Alec Douglas-Home in 1963, there was much talk of how toffs were retaking the Tories. The problem with this analysis is that it is, as the next Etonian PM might have put it, an inverted pyramid of piffle. The Cameron government was the least patrician, least wealthy and least public-school-educated – indeed least Etonian – Conservative-led government this country had seen to that point.
All 18 members of Anthony Eden’s cabinet (1955-1957) had attended public schools and 10 were OEs. In Harold Macmillan’s government (1957-1963) a lone non-public schoolboy was admitted. Of the 22 members of Margaret Thatcher’s first cabinet, six had been to Eton and only two – one being Thatcher herself – had not attended public schools. Two-thirds of John Major’s cabinet had attended public schools and three were indubitably aristocratic.
In contrast, Cameron’s first cabinet was the first Tory-led government in which a majority of ministers had not attended a public school. Even this understates the change, since – with a few exceptions, including the PM – the establishments represented had shifted down the public school pecking order.
What Narayan’s schooling illustrates is the hollowness of Labour’s public-school stereotyping used to justify their imposition of VAT on school fees.
Public schools too often are unwilling to justify their existence beyond pointing out how many bursaries they offer. They have a much broader case to make in their own defence but Narayan shows how Eton can transform lives. Let’s hope he makes that argument around the Cabinet table. The Berkshire secondary really is doing its bit for levelling up.
