Ashcroft All to Play For

The Advance of Rishi Sunak
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78590-813-2
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ashcroft, Michael

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2 TEENAGE KICKS
According to his sister Rachel, at the age of four Boris Johnson expressed the hope that he would grow up to be ‘world king’. Eton College, where the future premier went to school, prided itself on turning out supremely confident young men and would not have discouraged such lofty aspirations. It had, after all, produced no fewer than eighteen Prime Ministers by the time Johnson took up his place, a record of which it was fiercely proud. By contrast, Winchester College, the school Yashvir and Usha Sunak chose for their son, has always been more interested in intellectual ability. Until 2022, it was the alma mater of only one Prime Minister, Henry Addington, who entered Downing Street more than two centuries ago. Nevertheless, it has always taken great satisfaction in beating Eton in academic league tables. Unlike some public schools, it is simply not accessible to the ‘rich but thick’ and every boy who makes it through the rigorous entrance exams joins a ferociously bright community. The world Sunak entered as a nervous thirteen-year-old was – in the words of one former pupil – ‘intellectually arrogant’, and from the moment he arrived it would have been clear to him that he was going to have to work hard to compete. Tim Johnson, who was in the year above him at Winchester, says: If Eton’s problem is generally social arrogance, then Winchester’s is intellectual arrogance. What you get told an awful lot – if not spelled out then implicitly – is that by being there, you’re among the very brightest of your cohort. But you also know very quickly that you’re not the brightest in the room, because there is always someone cleverer than you. Whether that gives you arrogance and humility at the same time, I don’t know … Someone like Boris Johnson would have found it much harder to bluff through Winchester than he found it to bluff through Eton, I think. The premium is on intelligence not social skills. It is not hard to imagine how daunting it must have been for the young teenager as his parents dropped him off to begin the next stage of his education. The grandeur of the medieval buildings and the sheer size of the place – there are some 650 boys – must have added to the sense that he was stepping into a very different world from his relaxed little prep school. In Sunak’s case, he also stuck out because unlike the vast majority of other boys there, he was a day pupil. What made the transition considerably easier was the traditional house system, designed to create an extended family, in which new boys have plenty of support from teachers and older pupils and form lifelong friendships. Sunak was placed in a house called Trant’s, though its official name was Bramston’s. Home to about sixty boys aged thirteen to eighteen, Trant’s had its own dining hall, squash court, music room and large recreation room with snooker and pool tables. Thrown together in this way, new arrivals were unlikely to feel lonely for long and quickly learned to mix with pupils from a variety of backgrounds. Many fiercely academic schools begin preparing pupils for GCSEs from the moment they arrive, but the attitude to public exams at Winchester College is different. Proud as it has always been of its exam results, the school refuses to be constrained by the curriculum. Far from encouraging pupils to sit as many exams as possible, it does not even bother entering pupils for some subjects. According to Tim Johnson, in Sunak’s day the school ‘didn’t rate GCSEs very highly’ and there was no pressure on the most able pupils to sit subjects to rack up extra A grades. ‘We hardly took any GCSEs,’ he explains. ‘We didn’t do history, we didn’t do English literature.’ When it came to A-levels, the school was so confident in pupils’ ability to do well that instead of spending two years teaching the curriculum, they covered it in just one, devoting the first year of sixth form to educational material that would not form part of the exams but was nonetheless indirectly relevant. Johnson describes the overall set-up as ‘very academic’, with pupils ‘rigidly’ divided into sets according to ability. As at Eton College, exam marks were publicly displayed, an approach that fuelled intense competition. ‘Everyone knows where everyone else sits in the academic hierarchy.’ Sunak has described his time at Winchester College as ‘absolutely marvellous’. As a teenager, he is remembered as a ‘joiner’ who threw himself into everything the school had to offer and made friends easily. ‘He was a nice, unpretentious, un-difficult person; a good chap, always pleasant and polite,’ recalls another Old Wykehamist. Sports-wise, he was up against keener competition than he had been at Stroud, and though he was still a decent cricketer, he only made the Thirds. Sport was compulsory until sixth form and he was required to participate in various inter-house competitions, where, being fit and athletic, he did not let the side down. Perhaps to his relief, since he was very slight and shorter than most of his peers, there was no rugby. Instead, pupils played a complicated game unique to the school called Winchester College football, which Sunak enjoyed and was sufficiently good at to represent his house. For A-level, Sunak chose English literature, economics and maths. He also took AS-levels in biology and French. His parents were not entirely convinced by this selection. ‘They’re kind of classic Indian immigrant parents. They said do a degree that leads to a very specific job, and then have security of income – that was their driving mindset,’ Sunak has said. ‘When I said I was going to study economics at A-level, that was something my mother was very worried about, because it was not obvious what job that would lead to, in her mind.’ Nonetheless, economics quickly became his favourite class. He has described it as ‘absolutely my major academic love’. For English literature he recalls having ‘two amazing teachers’ to guide him through set texts which included Milton’s Paradise Lost and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. ‘As well as teaching us English, they combined it with teaching us a little bit about the history of the era as well. Which was really great, it just really brings it to life … But economics was my major nerdy passion,’ he would later recall, in an interview with pupils at a school in his constituency. * * * Winchester College liked to treat pupils as if they were young men, not children, an aspect of the culture Sunak particularly appreciated. As we have seen, his parents had encouraged him to work hard from a very young age, a discipline that was gently, but firmly, reinforced. Now he was at a boarding school, albeit as a day boy, he had to manage his own time, which he believes was one of the most valuable skills he acquired. Reflecting on his years at Winchester, he has said: It was really teaching you to be able to just figure out your own life a bit … Homework was not ‘here it is today, hand it in tomorrow’. It was much more ‘here’s all the stuff you need to do for next week’ – you kind of organise your own time and figure out when you’re going to do it … You can’t get your parents to help you with everything, so it teaches you that independence and that self-motivation. That’s probably the biggest kind of life lesson. Liberation from parental supervision at boarding schools can create an atmosphere of mischief-making, particularly in relation to alcohol and cigarettes, even for day students. The most senior pupils were allowed to buy a limited amount of beer at a sixth-form club and seem to have been able to get away with drinking quite a lot. This relatively laid-back approach must have presented significant temptations. However, Sunak seems to have stayed firmly on the straight and narrow. While the Hindu faith does not prohibit the consumption of alcohol, and Sunak’s father enjoys an occasional glass of red wine, the young Rishi simply did not like the taste or effect of alcohol – and never would. A friend says, ‘Rish tried lots of different types of alcohol growing up, but it just never really appealed. His friends kept encouraging him to, but it’s just not his thing.’ Such abstinence cannot have made the periodic discos with girls from neighbouring schools any easier. Even for the most confident boys these were awkward events, involving busloads of teenage girls suddenly descending on what was then a single-sex school for what Johnson describes as a ‘strictly policed dance’. The artifice of these social occasions did not diminish the excitement they generated, particularly among those who benefited from Dutch courage. While more daring boys were sneaking spirits into the school and occasionally experimenting with illicit drugs, it seems the naughtiest thing Sunak ever did at Winchester College was to smuggle a hand-held television into the school so that he did not miss any key games of Euro ’96. The contest took place in...