Dominic Raab: Honours, schools, boardrooms — get them right and see the underdog excel

Theresa May instructed her new cabinet that reviving social mobility must be at the heart of everything it does. Yet the clarion call for a more meritocratic society will ring hollow if the political elite is not held to the same standards.

The disclosure by this newspaper of 48 nominations for honours for Tory donors, aides and “remain” campaigners has a resonance well beyond the Westminster village. For many, it smacks of the most cynical caricature of a self-indulgent political class engaging in its customary nepotism. This matters because an honours system grounded in civic and meritocratic ideals is something to cherish. But the proliferation of honours, the numbers of dubious recipients and the brazen disbursement of knighthoods and peerages as rewards for political support has tainted the institution. If that’s how elites think meritocracy works, how can it be trusted to build a fairer society?

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And rather than bashing private schools, why not open them up to the smartest children regardless of social background? If the new government wants to be radical it can run with the Sutton Trust’s Open Access scheme, designed to open admission to the best independent schools to any child, on a meritocratic and means-tested basis.

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