Boris Johnson up before the headmaster

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Martin Hammond, who was Boris Johnson's housemaster at Eton, famously summed up his 17-year-old pupil:

"Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. [He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half).

"I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

On Sunday the historian and public school headmaster Anthony Seldon summoned him to his study.

Seldon was interviewed on Johnson by Tim Adams, who wrote:

Seldon is a man who has devoted his life to understanding and nurturing the kind of emotional intelligence and civic responsibility from which society can be woven. Johnson represents the wilful rupture of those beliefs. 

Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former prime minister’s charisma "lights up the room", but you sense too his almost personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his nation, but most of all, himself.

And here is Seldon's view in his own words:

“"The great prime ministers are all there at moments of great historical importance,but they have to respond to them well. Chamberlain didn’t; Churchill in 1940, did. Asquith didn’t; Lloyd George did in 1916.

"Johnson had Brexit, he had the pandemic, he had the invasion of Ukraine and incipient third world war. He could have been the prime minister he craved to be, but he wasn’t, because of his utter inability to learn."

Moving on from school, I'm currently reading Simon Kuper's Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Over the UK. 

My conclusion so far is that Oxford, with its emphasis on the ability to talk plausibly on a subject you know little about, fits its alumni to be contrarian journalists but not serious politicians.