. I n Britain, the link between private
boarding education and leadership is
gold-plated. If their parents can
afford it, children are sent away from
home to walk a well-trodden path that
leads straight from boarding school
through Oxbridge to high office in
institutions such as the judiciary, the
army, the City and, especially,
government. Our prime minister was
only seven when he was sent away to
board at Heatherdown preparatory
school in Berkshire. Like so many of the
men who hold leadership roles in
Britain, he learned to adapt his young
character to survive both the loss of his
family and the demands of boarding
school culture. The psychological impact
of these formative experiences on
Cameron and other boys who grow up
to occupy positions of great power and
responsibility cannot be overstated. It
leaves them ill-prepared for
relationships in the adult world and the
nation with a cadre of leaders who
perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying
and misogyny affecting the whole of
society.
Nevertheless, this
golden path is as
sure today as it was
100 years ago, when
men from such
backgrounds led us
into a disastrous
war; it is familiar,
sometimes mocked,
but taken for
granted. But it is
less well known that
costly, elite
boarding
consistently turns
out people who
appear much more
competent than
they actually are. They are particularly
deficient in non-rational skills, such as
those needed to sustain relationships,
and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be
leaders in today's world
I have been doing psychotherapy with
ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a
former boarding-school teacher and
boarder. My pioneering study of
privileged abandonment always sparks
controversy: so embedded in British life
is boarding that many struggle to see
beyond the elitism and understand its
impact. The prevalence of
institutionalised abuse is finally
emerging to public scrutiny, but the
effects of normalised parental neglect
are more widespread and much less
obvious. Am I saying, then, that David
Cameron, and the majority of our ruling
elite, were damaged by boarding?
It's complex. My studies show that
children survive boarding by cutting off
their feelings and constructing a
defensively organised self that severely
limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris
Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell,
Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for
being boarding-school survivors. For
socially privileged children are forced
into a deal not of their choosing, where
a normal family-based childhood is
traded for the hothousing of
entitlement. Prematurely separated
from home and family, from love and
touch, they must speedily reinvent
themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.
Paradoxically, they then struggle to
properly mature, since the child who
was not allowed to grow up organically
gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In
consequence, an abandoned child
complex within such adults ends up
running the show. This is why many
British politicians appear so boyish.
They are also reluctant to open their
ranks to women, who are strangers to
them and unconsciously held
responsible for their abandonment by
their mothers. With about two-thirds of
the current cabinet from such a
background, the political implications of
this syndrome are huge – because it's
the children inside the men running the
country who are effectively in charge.
Boarding children invariably construct
a survival personality that endures long
after school and operates strategically.
On rigid timetables, in rule-bound
institutions, they must be ever alert to
staying out of trouble. Crucially, they
must not look unhappy, childish or
foolish – in any way vulnerable – or
they will be bullied by their peers. So
they dissociate from all these qualities,
project them out on to others, and
develop duplicitous personalities that
are on the run, which is why ex-
boarders make the best spies.
Now attached to this internal structure
instead of a parent, the boarding child
survives, but takes into adulthood a
permanent unconscious anxiety and
will rarely develop what Daniel
Goleman calls emotional intelligence. In
adulthood he sticks to the same tactics:
whenever he senses a threat of being
made to look foolish, he will strike. We
see this in Cameron's over-reaction to
Angela Eagle MP, less than a year into
his new job. "Calm down, dear!" the PM
patronisingly insisted , as if she were the
one upset and not he. The opposite
benches loved it, of course, howling
"Flashman!" (the public school bully
from Tom Brown's Schooldays), but they
never take on the cause of these
leadership defects.
Bullying is inevitable and endemic in
24/7 institutions full of abandoned and
frightened kids. Ex-boarders' partners
often report that it ends up ruining
home life, many years later. Bullying
pervades British society, especially in
politics and the media, but, like
boarding, we normalise it. When, in
2011, Jeremy Clarkson ranted that he
would have striking public-sector
workers shot , he was even defended by
Cameron – it was apparently a bit of
fun. No prizes for guessing where both
men learned their styles. And no
wonder that the House of Commons,
with its adversarial architecture of
Victorian Gothic – just like a public
school chapel – runs on polarised debate
and bullying.
Strategic survival has many styles:
bullying is one; others include keeping
your head down, becoming a charming
bumbler, or keeping an incongruently
unruffled smile in place, like health
secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy
at Charterhouse. In a remarkable 1994
BBC documentary called The Making of
Them , whose title I borrowed for my
first book, young boarders were
discreetly filmed over their first few
weeks at prep school. Viewers can
witness the "strategic survival
personality" in the process of being
built. "Boarding school," says nine-year-
old Freddy, puffing himself up, putting
on his Very Serious Face and staring at
the camera, "has changed me, and the
one thing I can do now is get used [to
it]". This false independence, this
display of pseudo-adult seriousness is as
evident in the theatrical concern of
Cameron as it was in Tony Blair. It
displays the strategic duplicity learned
in childhood; it is hard to get rid of,
and, disastrously, deceives even its
creator.
The social privilege of boarding is
psychologically double-edged: it both
creates shame that prevents sufferers
from acknowledging their problems, as
well as unconscious entitlement that
explains why ex-boarder leaders are
brittle and defensive while still
projecting confidence. Boris is so
supremely confident that he needs
neither surname nor adult haircut; he
trusts his buffoonery to distract the
public from what Conrad Black called "a
sly fox disguised as a teddy bear". On
the steps of St Paul's, Boris commanded
the Occupy movement: "In the name of
God and Mammon, go!" Was it a lark –
Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded
message, announcing someone who, for
10 years, heard the King James Bible
read in chapel at Eton? Those who don't
recognise this language, it suggests, have
no right to be here, so they should just
clear off.
This anachronistic entitlement cannot
easily be renounced: it compensates for
years without love, touch or family, for
a personality under stress, for the lack
of emotional, relational and sexual
maturation. In my new book, Wounded
Leaders, I trace the history of British
elitism and the negative attitude
towards children to colonial times and
what I call the "rational man project",
whose Victorian boarding schools were
industrial power stations churning out
stoic, superior leaders for the empire.
Recent evidence from neuroscience
experts shows what a poor training for
leaderships this actually is. In short, you
cannot make good decisions without
emotional information (Professor
Antonio Damasio); nor grow a flexible
brain without good attachments (Dr Sue
Gerhardt); nor interpret facial signals if
your heart has had to close down
(Professor Stephen Porges); nor see the
big picture if your brain has been fed
on a strict diet of rationality (Dr Iain
McGilchrist). These factors underpin
Will Hutton's view that "the political
judgments of the Tory party have, over
the centuries, been almost continuously
wrong" .
With survival but not empathy on his
school curriculum from age seven,
Cameron is unlikely to make good
decisions based on making relationships
in Europe, as John Major could. He can
talk of leading Europe, but not of
belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders
cannot conceive of communal solutions,
because they haven't had enough
belonging at home to understand what
it means. Instead, they are limited to
esprit de corps with their own kind. In
order to boost his standing with the
rightwingers in his party, Cameron still
thinks he can bully for concessions,
make more supposedly "robust" vetos.
His European counterparts don't
operate like this. Angela Merkel has held
multiple fragile coalitions together
through difficult times by means of her
skill in relationships and collaboration.
Though deadlocked at home, Barack
Obama impressed both sides of British
politics and in 2009 entered the hostile
atmosphere of the Kremlin to befriend
the then-president Dmitry Medvedev
and make headway on a difficult
disarmament treaty. In a subsequent
meeting with the real power behind the
throne, Obama invited Vladimir Putin to
expound for an hour on what hadn't
worked in recent Russian-American
relationships, before responding.
Despite their elitist education, and
because of it, our own "wounded
leaders" can't manage such
statesmanship.
To change our politics, we'll have to
change our education system. Today,
most senior clinicians recognise
boarding syndrome, several of whom
recently signed a letter to the Observer
calling for the end of early boarding . Its
elitism ought to motivate the left. The
Attlee government intended to disband
the public schools, but not even
Wilson's dared to. There's a cash
problem: boarding is worth billions and
has a massive lobby. Unlike most other
European countries, our state does not
contribute a per capita sum towards
private education, so dismantling these
schools, which still enjoy charitable
status, would be costly. But can we
really afford to sacrifice any more
children for the sake of second-rate
leadership?