On merit

On 18 December 2012, as part of the year-long celebration of her Diamond Jubilee, the Queen attended a meeting of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet – the first time a reigning monarch had done so since 1781. The next day, the Daily Telegraph published a rather cheeky front-page picture of the Queen and her Cabinet, not in formal pose, but getting ready for their formal pose. The Queen, in the middle of the front row, is quiet and composed. Everybody else is in high spirits, laughing, jostling and acting up a bit, in a schoolboy-ish kind of way.

It is a picture of a ruling elite at ease with itself. Besides the Queen, there are 32 people in the photograph. Thirty-one of them are white. Twenty-seven are men. All 32 have a higher education qualification. Twenty-seven went to a Russell Group university. Twenty-one went to Oxford or Cambridge. Twenty-three went to a selective school. Fifteen went to a ‘public’ (that is, private) school. Only six went to a comprehensive (that is, state) school. By way of comparison: out of the entire UK population only 7% of children go to public schools, and less than 1% of students go to Oxbridge.

The press office of No. 10 Downing Street at the time had a standard response to questions about this membership profile of Cabinet: the prime minister selects his Cabinet and senior officers entirely on the basis of merit.

Mr Cameron was not the first prime minister to place a high premium on merit. His predecessor’s predecessor, Tony Blair, on becoming prime minster, declared that New Labour would reconstruct Britain as a meritocracy. ‘The Britain of the elite is over’, he declared. ‘The new Britain is a meritocracy.’

In saying so, Mr Blair clearly thought that (a) everybody knows what a meritocracy is, and (b) a meritocracy is self-evidently a good thing. In at least the first respect he was mistaken. The word ‘meritocracy’ is not of long standing, and has changed meaning since it was first coined. It was made up in 1958 by a social activist called Michael Young, in a book titled The Rise of the Meritocracy,4 and it was intended more as a pejorative than a compliment.