James Fergusson: At last, we Etonians no longer need fib about our alma mater
Gutsy, the Sun is calling him. Quite right. David Cameron didn't just refuse to apologise at Blackpool for his Eton schooling, he revelled in it. Because he'd been to a 'fantastic' school and understood the meaning of a 'great education', he was better placed than anyone to get the same for the rest of Britain's children.
I may be partisan. I'm an Old Etonian, a contemporary and friend of Dave's, but I've never voted Conservative. What heartens me is that Cameron is the first senior Tory Old Etonian not embarrassed about his background since Alec Douglas-Home.
The public's antennae are extraordinarily sensitive to this stuff. That's why Who's Who is littered with the stalled careers of well-educated Tories who tried to pretend to be something they were not. When Douglas Hurd, an OE, tried to persuade us of his working-class credentials during the run-off for the post-Thatcher leadership in 1990 he came third, behind Michael Heseltine and John Major. Think of William Hague, down and dirty at the Notting Hill Carnival with Ffion, a coconut and a straw. A poll found 66 per cent of people thought him 'a bit of a wally'. George Osborne almost fell into the trap at Blackpool when he described all the hard work his dad had put into a 'wallpaper business' - as if Osborne & Little of Chelsea ever traded as a couple of blokes in a dodgy van.
But Dave's got Victoria plums in his mouth and doesn't give a hoot. It wasn't just the conference who applauded him. Even talkSPORT's Jon Gaunt thinks he's all right.
No other democracy has chosen, as Britain has for more than 40 years, to exclude its brightest stars from high office solely on the grounds that their education was elitist. Imagine Bush, Kennedy or either of the Roosevelts losing because they went to Yale or Harvard. The French, who set up l'Ecole Nationale d'Administration to train people to run the country (it has produced two Presidents and seven Prime Ministers) must think we're potty.
More than half of Douglas-Home's 1964 cabinet were Old Etonians. Perhaps that was overdoing things, and when Harold Wilson replaced him there was a widespread feeling of good riddance to the old plutocracy. But plutocrats can be talented, too. Hazel Blears thinks Boris Johnson is unsuitable for mayor of London because he's a 'fogeyish, bigoted and upper-class twit'. Well, he may be unsuitable for some of those reasons, but not, surely, because he's upper-class?
She agrees that being mayor is an elite job, so why resent the fact that a candidate went to an elite school? Isn't this precisely what they should be for? Eton has produced 18 Prime Ministers since the 18th century, including Walpole, Pitt the Elder, Wellington, Gladstone, Salisbury, Eden and Macmillan. Eton's legacy is not something we should ignore.
Cameron is a bit of a saviour to us Old Etonians. At last we don't have to apologise because our parents sent us to the best school they could afford. It is, of course, pathetic that we ever felt we had to. When I was there in the early Eighties, the worst question you could be asked was, 'Where do you go to school?' 'A college near Slough,' we'd mumble. I don't know who we thought we were fooling. In those days we weren't even allowed out of the school grounds unless we were wearing a jacket and tie. That has long been abolished, happily; we kept being picked on by yobs from Slough.
In 1979, The Jam released a single, 'The Eton Rifles'. 'All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,' Paul Weller sang. 'What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?' His song was about a pub punch-up between the rich kids and the locals: class war writ small.
Ungrateful denial of the alma mater used to be a sad joke among OEs. Not any more. It never passed us by that, in The Jam song the Snooties won. It was the opposition who ended up 'beaten and bloody' with sick down their shirts. Brown likes school mottos; well, 'Floreat Etona'.
· James Fergusson's The Vitamin Murders is published by Portobello at £12.99