It’s not just in this particular part of the Establishment that this happens:

Government ministers are eight times more likely to have been privately educated than the general population. More than half of the new cabinet (58%), including Sunak himself, attended private schools, compared with only 7% of the British population.

That figure is similar to that for the new prime minister’s two immediate predecessors: 60% of Liz Truss’s cabinet were privately educated, as was the case for about two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s first cabinet and those following his 2021 and 2020 reshuffles.

We’ll admit to not having checked this but we’d strongly suspect the Shadow Cabinet has, even if to a lesser degree, rather more than that 7% of the general population. It’s also something of a standing joke that those who write The Guardian are not exactly nor usually the products of that bog standard comp.

Which leads us to those two ways. It’s possible, as many do, to complain about the privilege which comes from those private educations. Then propose that something must be done - abolish the private educations perhaps.

We think that the much more interesting question - much more important too - is what is wrong with the state educations on offer for them to lead to this result? Once we’ve worked that out perhaps we could go to work on fixing whatever those problems are. Which, we would insist, would mean changing how the state schools operate, not abolishing that competition which shows them up.

Observations about the country are all very well. What matters though is what questions you ask about why it is this way. A complaint that private schools seem to produce our rulers is fair enough. But why do they, what’s wrong with the state schooling that leads to this result? As we say, that’s the much more interesting and important thing to be asking.