Is Ian Jack a complete idiot?

There's a particularly stupid piece in the Guardian today by Ian Jack, based on this premise: Next week 7 million Londoners may wake to discover Boris Johnson is their mayor. Some time before the summer of 2010 60 million UK citizens may discover that David Cameron is their prime minister. If you live in London as I do that means living under a double yoke of old Etonians. That's the problem with elections, Mr Jack. You get who you - or someone else - voted for.

I'm sick of reading about how awful it is that old Etonians are involved in politics. So what? Why is it worse than having alumni of Bog Standard Comprehensive in Inner City Wasteland? Doesn't the calibre of the man or woman. and what they are offering, count?

Then again, Jack asks the right question but in the blinkered, stupid way of so many of his ilk fails to grasp the obvious answer: The front bench and Cameron's private office are stacked with old Eton boys. Journalists write about it continually, but with remarkably little sense of shock, as though the grammar school years of Heath, Thatcher and Major had never existed and the old routes to power (a school, a club, a good marriage, a trust fund) were just the inescapable, unalterable facts in the web of English life.Why do you think it is that "the grammar school years" are over? Difficult one, eh? Might it not be because they were abolished? Doh. Is it any wonder that the alumni of schools providing a great education to those who can afford it have risen to the top of politics because those who can't afford a great education have been condemned to dross?