Chris Johns: For Brexiteers the point is to win. Everyone else can go hang
The debating chambers of Eton and Oxbridge do not care for compromise
English elite: only two things matter – to win the argument and to promote the interests of my class. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Getty
The first time I met an old Etonian was back in the early 1980s. I was spending a day a week as an economics tutor in an ancient college of Cambridge University and had been tasked with reading and discussing some of the student’s weekly essays.
Regular readers of this column will no doubt be astonished to learn that this erstwhile tutor was somewhat lefty in those days and made no attempt to hide his views. In a regular clash – always an unfailingly courteous one – with an undergraduate from Eton, I asked him why he always seemed to disagree for the sake of it, rather than changing his mind based on reason and logic.