Cameron’s new cabinet: half of PM’s top team went to private school

Following a majority win for the Conservatives in Thursday’s election, David Cameron has been busy re-shuffling the government cabinet. Among the announcements so far have been posts for Amber Rudd and Priti Patel – as Cameron tries to increase the number of women in the cabinet line-up – and also news of a political role for the London mayor, Boris Johnson, who is now able to attend cabinet meetings.

Previously, only eight of the 33 ministers (24%) able to attend Cameron’s cabinet were women. The number of the women in the new all-Tory cabinet now stands at 10, or 31% of all the ministers allowed to attend meetings.

…

The Sutton Trust recently published a breakdown of the educational background of all of parliament’s MPs following the election. It found that 32% of MPs the post-election House of Commons are privately educated, with around half (48%) of Conservative MPs attending fee-paying schools, compared with 14% of Liberal Democrats and 17% of Labour MPs.

It also found that almost a third (32%) of backbench Conservative MPs in the new parliament and 26% of all MPs had attended Oxbridge. It did note, however, that the proportion of Conservative MPs to have attended an independent school had fallen from 54% in the last parliament and 73% in 1979.

Read the full article here.