Alec Douglas Home
Rishi Sunak’s new Cabinet is the most public school dominated since 1964 when Sir Alec Douglas Home’s Tory Cabinet had all four top positions filled by ex-public schoolboys. Home himself was an Old Etonian and the only PM to have played First Class cricket(for Middlesex). He had renounced a Peerage and won a By-Election to be briefly PM, before Labour won the October 1964 Election.
The Sutton Trust has found that 63% of the Cabinet are privately educated underlining that the Tories remain a Goverment of the few not the many
Sutton Trust Report (Guardian 14th November)
The Sutton Trust, a charity supporting social mobility, has done its analysis of which schools and universities the new cabinet attended, with all four holders of the so-called great offices of state – prime minister, chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary – having attended private schools, the first time this has happened since 1964, under Alec Douglas-Home.
The analysis finds that Sunak’s latest cabinet is little different to his previous administrations, with 63% having gone to private schools, 53% having attended Oxford or Cambridge universities, and 41% having been both privately and Oxbridge educated.
The privately educated proportion of ministers is well above the 30% in Theresa May’s cabinet, or the 50% in David Cameron’s 2015 cabinet. The last Labour government’s cabinets had around 30% of ministers who had been privately educated.
The trust also found that the proportion of Sunak’s cabinet ministers educated at comprehensive schools is the same as Liz Truss’s cabinet, at 19%, but lower than Boris Johnson’s first cabinet, with 27%. In Sunak’s latest cabinet, 16% went to a selective grammar school.
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