William Waldegrave, the provost of Eton College, is possibly the most affluent individual I have ever encountered. This is not solely owing to his title of Lord Waldegrave, which is just a run-of-the-mill life peerage bestowed upon him subsequent to his 16-year tenure as a Conservative minister. It is because his father was the twelfth Earl Waldegrave, and his elder brother is the thirteenth Earl. His sister, Susan, is a lady-in-waiting to the Queen and is the godmother of Prince William. William’s brother was a page at the coronation. The earldom dates back to the early 1700s, but the Waldegrave family were influential well before that, with one family member serving as the Speaker of the House of Commons during the reign of Richard II, and another being knighted by Mary I and given the Chewton estate in Somerset, where William was born and still farms today. William even travelled to boarding school on a train pulled by a steam locomotive called Earl Waldegrave.
Waldegrave has deep roots with Eton College, and his entire family has attended, including him, his father, brother, and son. His maternal grandfather played cricket for the Eton XI against Harrow at Lord’s in 1892, and another ancestor drowned on the college campus.
It may come as no surprise then that Waldegrave found himself embroiled in controversy this past summer over attempts by the government to increase social mobility. The then Cabinet Office Minister Matt Hancock declared he would direct the civil service to solicit information regarding applicants’ family backgrounds and educational histories and would encourage top employers to follow suit. Waldegrave protested that children should not be penalized for their parents’ decisions, and jobs should be awarded based on merit instead of social engineering. He announced he would resign as a member of the Conservative party should such policies persist.
Anyone familiar with Waldegrave finds this threat to be startling. He is not an especially passionate person, and in his memoirs published last year, he confessed that he did not enter politics to advance a particular cause, but rather to use "as much intelligence as one could muster" to address any problems that arose. When Kenneth Clarke was perceived to have inflamed doctors and nurses with his changes to the NHS, Margaret Thatcher replaced him with Waldegrave, stating, "Kenneth has aroused their ire, and I want you to settle them down." Though he dutifully served under Thatcher, he was typically viewed as a "wet," firmly positioned on the party’s left.
His primary loyalties lie with Edward Heath, who he served as a private secretary. He opposed immigration controls, capital punishment, and laws repressing homosexuality. He was never entirely at ease with the modern Conservative party’s commitment to free enterprise and hostility towards state-run institutions. He noted in 2012 that "private good, public bad just is not true." He laments that there is no slogan in our present society that can compel the wealthy to exhibit solidarity with the impoverished.
So, why did he criticize Hancock with such force? "Because his intentions would generate new kinds of injustice. At Eton, I raise funds for scholarships for children whose families are unable to afford the school’s fees. If my party’s government is going to discriminate against these children, I will raise the alarm. Oxford reports that 25% of its students from lower socio-economic backgrounds come from independent schools on scholarships. We had a young man from a very distressed background in East London, and he is now at one of the most prestigious colleges in Oxford. His resume would appear unsatisfactory to Hancock because it specifies Eton and Christ Church, and everyone would assume he must be in the Bullingdon Club; well, I can tell you that he most certainly is not."
I remind him that Hancock later clarified that personal information regarding one’s background and education would be collected anonymously and "would not form the basis of any individual recruitment decision." Hancock sought to encourage large employers to reform their recruitment practices, reducing unconscious biases in the process, so that they could draw on more diverse talent pools. However, they cannot do this without measuring the consequences.
"That puts him in a much better position," Waldegrave remarks. "However, and with the best of intentions, when you collect this type of data, you are moving further towards both goals and quotas. There is a disparity between intentions and outcomes in these instances." He cites Goodhart’s Law, which was named after another Old Etonian, an economist named Charles Goodhart: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
However, the progress towards equal opportunities has been excruciatingly slow. Most of the top positions in the UK are held by those who have attended fee-paying schools. Hancock informs us that the civil service fast stream is less socially diverse than graduates from Oxford and Cambridge. Do we need targets or even quotas to achieve genuine change?
The civil service and universities need to actively encourage students to consider joining them for the common goal of improving these institutions without resorting to quotas. This sentiment is echoed by Eton, who have appointed a director of outreach to find gifted children, as well as those in boarding need, but not at the expense of other schools.
This conversation takes place at the London Coutts headquarters with Waldegrave as the non-executive chairman. He splits his time between the bank and Eton, where he holds the position of provost and works seven days a week. Waldegrave admits he never found his ideal sinecure, but his lifelong ambition was to reach the top, a dream he realized by becoming president of the Oxford Union, obtaining a first, and becoming a fellow of All Souls.
He went on to hold multiple positions within the UK government, including responsibility for higher education, where he imposed university cuts while also temporarily preventing polytechnics from being removed from local authority control. Waldegrave is skeptical of academies and believes that they should eventually be accountable to elected officials with local education authorities reinstated. He is also wary of the national curriculum and prefers to promote pluralism among schools.
Though he desired to become foreign secretary, his political career was marred when his involvement in a row over government guidelines saw him labeled as “designedly misleading” but without intent to deceive. Despite this setback, Waldegrave is self-deprecating about his experience and continues to work in financial services.
Although Waldegrave is a product of a gentler, more inclusive form of Toryism, he is not without fault. He acknowledges his father’s belief in a “hierarchical Christian socialism” and feels some connection to that philosophy. Interestingly, he supports the idea that elite universities should take two pupils from every school in the country, regardless of social status but in practice Eton alone wouldn’t settle for such modest quotas.
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