I have asmall piece in this month's Prospect about Old Etonians and politics. It's behind a subscription wall, but here's an extract:
Boris Johnson's election as mayor of London appears to have put paid to that idea. There could hardly be a more caricature Old Etonian than the foppish Johnson, but it did not stop voters in the most cosmopolitan city in the world from electing him. Far from seeing him as a pre-modern relic, they relished his postmodern idiosyncrasy.
It is difficult to understand why some people have a problem with a political system in which the products of privilege involve themselves in politics. First, to put this in the proper context, the influence of public schooling on the Conservative party hasn't increased, it has sharply declined: the percentage of privately educated MPs in the shadow cabinet is, at 62 per cent, lower than any (actual) Tory cabinet from 1938 to 1992; John Major's was 80 per cent privately educated. The only two old Etonians in the shadow cabinet are Cameron and Oliver Letwin. Heath’s cabinet was 22 per cent Old Etonian, Thatcher’s was 20 per cent.