THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SMARM OF BLAIR

Andrew Gimson attributes the PM's success

to snobbely and a system Labour purports to despise

TONY BLAIR sounds charming, really charming — or so many people have found, including myself. He also sounds bogus, deeply bogus — or so many people have found, including myself. His style is unusually hard to fathom: at the same time honest and open, with an attractive laugh, yet ingratiating and secretive, with a marked unwillingness to give straight replies.

Nobody, so far as I know, has suggested that Blair is like this because he went to a public school, Fettes College, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He owes a vast amount to the place. His charm and his bogusness, his ability to put people at their ease, his exceptional (though perhaps now weakening) appeal to Conservative voters, his sure touch with the Establishment, his scorn for established institutions, his pose as a man of the people, his love of play-acting. his ability to conceal his real thoughts: all these might still be found if the Prime Minister had never gone near Fettes, but all can plausibly be shown, in the form they take with him, to owe much to his time there. This may sound like a frivolous analysis, but the sheer frivolity and self-interest of many Blair supporters drives Conservatives into paroxysms of rage. As one enraged Tory candidate put it to me: 'These treacherous middle-class snobs go for him just because he looks the part It's creepy and it's wrong.'

We tend nowadays to treat someone's schooling as a rather minor influence, scarcely a polite subject to dwell on in this egalitarian age. But Blair's schooling sets him apart from all his predecessors since Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Blair is no patrician and Fettes may not be Eton, but Blair's father did send him there after seeing it described as the 'Eton of Scotland', and it is a very considerable school, and of course much better, from Blair's point of view, for not being Eton — a place whose mere name has the unfortunate effect of making a lot of people feel chippy. Sir John Simon and Selwyn Lloyd went to Fettes, but the most interesting Old Fettesian politician before Mr Blair was lain Macleod, who once protested in these pages at the way in which a magic circle of Old Etonians had decided the succession from Macmillan to Home. Fettes is remote enough for its sons and daughters to seem, if they choose, to have no connection with privilege.

Blair himself has no desire to direct our attention to this advantageous but disagreeable period of his youth. He recognises his good fortune in having had 'a decent education', but at quite frequent intervals makes plain his apparently generous desire that everyone else should have one too. As he put it in an early party political broadcast: 'Now, you can't do everything for people. But you can at least give them access to the type of opportunities that I had.'

Can you? For whatever else he may manage to achieve in the way of reform to the British educational system, we may be quite sure that he neither wishes nor, even if he wished, would have the faintest hope of recreating the conditions which existed when he started at Fettes in 1966. He arrived just in time to experience some of the hardships which were once regarded — what a vanished world this seems — as one of the most beneficial elements of a publicschool education, John Rentoul, whose biography of Blair has just appeared in a new edition containing much new material, describes how Blair disliked being away from home and 'hated the harsh discipline and the practice of fagging' when he arrived at Fettes. Blair was fag to a prefect called Michael Gascoigne, who tells us: Blair would clean my shoes. Blanco my army belt and polish the brass on it. If I couldn't see my face in it, he would have it thrown back at him. He would also, if it was a games afternoon, lay out my rugger kit on the bed for me, or my whites if it was cricket. . There was always a requirement for toast, but we insisted it had to be one-inch thick,

no thinner, no thicker, with lashings of butter and marmalade. And Blair would steam into the adjoining kitchen where he made particularly good toast. Blair was beaten a number of times by the prefects. He would doubtless dismiss as perverse any suggestion that this was of benefit to him.

His contemporaries at Fettes remember Blair always 'railing against authority', infuriating the masters and the more conformist boys. He got on well, however, with his English master, Eric Anderson, who would later become Head Master of Eton, where he is now provost. Blair was allowed to transfer to Anderson's boarding-house, where there was no beating or fagging: New Fettes, as it were. It is clear that Blair has always been a moderniser: his later lack of affection for either the Labour party or the House of Commons comes as no surprise. Under Anderson's encouragement, Blair did a lot of acting. Anyone who sees in Blair's oratory a teenager rehearsing with affected sincerity for the house play is looking back to a passage in his life which actually occurred.

Anderson found Blair quite a difficult pupil, but was plainly well able to cope with him. Unfortunately for Blair, in 1970, a year before he was due to leave, Anderson departed to become headmaster of Abingdon School. He was succeeded by a much less tolerant housemaster, who became the only teacher at Fettes to beat the persistently rule-flouting Blair.

But free-spirited though Blair's rebellion may seem, one should also recognise a kind of conformity in it. Like vast numbers of public schoolboys at the time, he wanted to be a rock star. As Rentoul says, 'In the sixth form, Blair was a leading figure in the school's counter-culture. He was flamboyant and aloof, with a big, lippy mouth like Mick Jagger, and younger boys were in awe of him.' In 1971 it was intolerable, or at least highly embarrassing, to be taken for a public schoolboy. Most of us developed a passionate desire to be classless, and that meant proletarianising our hair, our dress, our accents. Blair's life-long pretence of being a man of the people, and his ability to play down his public-school origins, can reasonably be presumed to spring from this. The public schools ensured their own survival, and the continued success of their pupils, by yielding to a social revolution.

The fact that Blair's man-of-the-people act does not ring quite true is also pure 1971. One of the odd things about wanting as a public schoolboy to become a rock star was that, although it could be thought of as a way of breaking free from the world of privilege, such a career also held out the prospect of riches beyond the dreams of avarice. It wasn't just that you could sleep with as many groupies, take as many drugs and trash as many hotel rooms as you liked (none of which seems to have been what Blair wanted). Here was a fantasy world in which you could at the same time be equal and quite amazingly unequal, normal and yet a member of a tiny elite.

Blair as Prime Minister has become a member of a tiny elite, but he still has a tremendous desire to be normal. As he put it to Anne Applebaum in a recent interview in the Sunday Telegraph:

Sometimes it would be nice to be absolutely normal.... I am still very normal. I was saying to some children today in the school that I visited: that they are meeting someone who is very well known, but what they don't realise is that I was just like them and I feel basically exactly the same as I always did.... I still believe very much in what I'm doing now and know I've got more to give, but there's no point in staying in the job for the sake of it.... I'm not big on status.

Nor are rock stars: they just get lumped with all this status which frankly is rather an embarrassment, and frankly they have to say they're just the same guy they ever were. This rock-star-speak is Blair at his most bogus, even if it is a bogusness which he himself believes to be utterly sincere.

Blair from his earliest years showed a marked talent for charming the Establishment and working from within it. Good luck to him, but there's no need to do him the additional honour of accepting at face value his claim that he is an ordinary kind of a guy. In the autumn of 1970 the first girl arrived at Fettes, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart. Blair became her boyfriend: as she explained later, He was so bright, so engaging — and very funny.' Her father, Lord Mackenzie Stuart, a judge, saved Blair from being expelled immediately after sitting his A-levels, instead arranging for him to go and live in the Mackenzie Stuart house.

So Blair's rebellion remained of comfortably limited extent. Consider by contrast Stephen Fry: already a schoolboy actor and debater of far greater genius than Blair when I arrived at Uppingham in 1971, but also a rebel with no instinct for stopping a safe way short of trouble. Fry was unbelievably witty, and was perfectly capable of charming the Establishment if he chose, but after a series of misdemeanours, including being caught stealing money from matron's handbag, he was chucked out of Uppingham, and a few years later he had a spell in prison. Fry recovered and went to Cambridge, but one cannot imagine such disasters befalling Blair.

In his gap year Blair went to London and set up a rock band with some boys who had just left St Paul's and Westminster. Blair tried out the rock-music option, rather as many people have tried to write comic novels, but he never staked his life on it. At Oxford he was lead singer for a rock band founded by two Old Wykehamists. But he continued to pursue a conventional career, law followed by politics, and he never let rock music become a convenient pretext for general dissipation. In his second year at Oxford he took the impressively unfashionable step of getting confirmed into the Church of England in his college chapel. There is no evidence that this decision had anything to do with Fettes.

At every stage of his life Blair has been uncommonly good at getting on with people. The members of Trimdon Labour Club in his constituency who know him actually like him. But he is also brilliant, as one Conservative friend of his since Oxford put it to me with unfeigned admiration, at charming a duchess or a roomful of Sloaney women. Many a Tory backwoodsman who is repelled by Blair's smarminess, his barbarous approach to the British constitution, his opposition to fox-hunting, still yields to the feeling that he is somehow 'one of us'. It is Fettes which has enabled him to convey this duplicitous impression.

I do not mean that if William Hague had gone to Fettes, and Tony Blair had been to Wath-upon-Dearne Comprehensive School, the balance of advantage would be reversed. If both of them had gone to Eton, then I am assured by an Etonian that 'Blair would have been elected to Pop, while Hague might not. Blair would have greased his way in.' As it was, Fettes undoubtedly strengthened Blair's

natural abilities, while Wath-upon-Dearne may, one fears, have failed to put right some of Hague's general crassness. It is hard to imagine that Blair would ever have persisted for long with Sebastian Coe as his aide-de-camp. There is a sort of ruthlessness in public schools, a brutal recognition when someone is not up to the job.

But what of the Labour party? Why has Fettes worked with them? Attlee went to Haileybury and Gaitskell to Winchester, so the question may seem superfluous. But Blair won the Labour leadership in large part because any fool could see he was better than Gordon Brown at appealing to undecided voters in Middle England. Brown's deeper roots in the party and his mighty intellect were vanquished by the intellectually derisory quality of charm. No wonder Brown was indignant. It is also worth remembering, when considering why Blair won, that only a few years ago much of the Labour party was determined to abolish private education, and your chances of rising within the party can still be ruined by sending your children to private schools.

Blair is the perfect leader for a party which wants to proclaim its new-found sympathy with middle-class aspirations. You too can send your child to Fettes, the Labour parry seems to say. He or she could even become our next leader. From the party that in almost its first legislative act abolished the assisted-places scheme, this is a bit rich.

Not long before Blair became Labour leader, I had lunch with him at the Gay Hussar in Soho. At some point I made a remark which, as soon as uttered, I realised was incredibly rude. He laughed in the most charming way. This is all I remember about the lunch: Blair's charming laugh. It may be all that most of us will remember about him, for it is still not clear what substance lies beneath the classy exterior of this public-school man.

Andrew Gimson is foreign editor of The Spectator.