Fee-charging schools are the first thread in Britain's web of privilege – the state sector needs help to unravel it

It is not good for society, for social cohesion or for the economy to have the best jobs nabbed by the children of the already rich, creating a vicious cycle of advantage

Public school boys are pictured playing the traditional Eton Wall Game. (Getty)

Britain’s most influential people are five times more likely to have studied at a private school than the general population, according to the Social Mobility Commission, an excellent body that is absurdly underpowered to do much about the most class-ridden society in the advanced world. We seem to be drifting towards a second upstairs-downstairs Edwardian era of inequality.

A quick glance at the backgrounds of the two contenders to be Britain’s next prime minister leaves little doubt that, as the commission now reports, Britain is still run by the products of its fee-charging schools. Boris Johnson (Eton, classics at Balliol College Oxford, former foreign secretary) is up against Jeremy Hunt (Charterhouse, PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, now foreign secretary). The winner’s predecessor but one, David Cameron, also did PPE at Oxford, and went to Eton. If the Conservative Party is dedicated to opportunity for all, as it is often claims, it has a funny way of showing it.

Mr Cameron’s predecessor but one, Tony Blair, went to St John’s College, Oxford to do law, having attended the fee-charging Fettes College in Edinburgh. The public schools might be expected to populate the upper echelons of the Tory party, the royal family, the aristocracy, the law, the civil and diplomatic service, business, the media, academia and even certain sports such as cricket or rugby union, but they are also peppered around the top of the Labour Party, including the leader Jeremy Corbyn and his press secretary Seamus Milne.