public school smarm of Blair, The

Spectator, The, May 5, 2001 by Gimson, Andrew

Andrew Gimson attributes the PM's success to snobbery and a system Labour purports to despise

TONY BLAIR sounds charming, really charming - or so many people have found, including myself. He also sounds bogus, deeply bogus - or so many people have found, including myself. His style is unusually hard to fathom: at the same time honest and open, with an attractive laugh, yet ingratiating and secretive, with a marked unwillingness to give straight replies.

Nobody, so far as I know, has suggested that Blair is like this because he went to a public school, Fettes College, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He owes a vast amount to the place. His charm and his bogusness, his ability to put people at their ease, his exceptional (though perhaps now weakening) appeal to Conservative voters, his sure touch with the Establishment, his scorn for established institutions, his pose as a man of the people, his love of play-acting, his ability to conceal his real thoughts: all these might still be found if the Prime Minister had never gone near Fettes, but all can plausibly be shown, in the form they take with him, to owe much to his time there. This may sound like a frivolous analysis, but the sheer frivolity and self-interest of many Blair supporters drives Conservatives into paroxysms of rage. As one enraged Tory candidate put it to me: `These treacherous middle-class snobs go for him just because he looks the part. It's creepy and it's wrong.'

We tend nowadays to treat someone's schooling as a rather minor influence, scarcely a polite subject to dwell on in this egalitarian age. But Blair's schooling sets him apart from all his predecessors since Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Blair is no patrician and Fettes may not be Eton, but Blair's father did send him there after seeing it described as the `Eton of Scotland', and it is a very considerable school, and of course much better, from Blair's point of view, for not being Eton - a place whose mere name has the unfortunate effect of making a lot of people feel chippy. Sir John Simon and Selwyn Lloyd went to Fettes, but the most interesting Old Fettesian politician before Mr Blair was lain Macleod, who once protested in these pages at the way in which a magic circle of Old Etonians had decided the succession from Macmillan to Home. Fettes is remote enough for its sons and daughters to seem, if they choose, to have no connection with privilege.

Blair himself has no desire to direct our attention to this advantageous but disagreeable period of his youth. He recognises his good fortune in having had 'a decent education', but at quite frequent intervals makes plain his apparently generous desire that everyone else should have one too. As he put it in an early party political broadcast: `Now, you can't do everything for people. But you can at least give them access to the type of opportunities that I had.'

Can you? For whatever else he may manage to achieve in the way of reform to the British educational system, we may be quite sure that he neither wishes nor, even if he wished, would have the faintest hope of recreating the conditions which existed when he started at Fettes in 1966. He arrived just in time to experience some of the hardships which were once regarded what a vanished world this seems - as one of the most beneficial elements of a publicschool education. John Rentoul, whose biography of Blair has just appeared in a new edition containing much new material, describes how Blair disliked being away from home and `hated the harsh discipline and the practice of fagging' when he arrived at Fettes. Blair was fag to a prefect called Michael Gascoigne, who tells us:

Blair would clean my shoes, Blanco my army belt and polish the brass on it. If I couldn't see my face in it, he would have it thrown back at him. He would also, if it was a games afternoon, lay out my rugger kit on the bed for me, or my whites if it was cricket .... There was always a requirement for toast, but we insisted it had to be one-inch thick, no thinner, no thicker, with lashings of butter and marmalade. And Blair would steam into the adjoining kitchen where he made particularly good toast. Blair was beaten a number of times by the prefects. He would doubtless dismiss as perverse any suggestion that this was of benefit to him.

His contemporaries at Fettes remember Blair always `railing against authority', infuriating the masters and the more conformist boys. He got on well, however, with his English master, Eric Anderson, who would later become Head Master of Eton, where he is now provost. Blair was allowed to transfer to Anderson's boarding-house, where there was no beating or fagging: New Fettes, as it were. It is clear that Blair has always been a moderniser: his later lack of affection for either the Labour party or the House of Commons comes as no surprise. Under Anderson's encouragement, Blair did a lot of acting. Anyone who sees in Blair's oratory a teenager rehearsing with affected sincerity for the house play is looking back to a passage in his life which actually occurred.