>>797 TH went to Cambridge.

But I think you maybe get a false impression from him , and from the British press generally, about what that Eton/Oxford combination means. I know a lot of people who went to both, and they are almost without exception highly impressive individuals. That is not surprising when you consider the quality of those institutions. Eton is an incredibly competitive school to get into, and it is not just rich boys who go there - it offers £6 million a year in scholarships, which for one school is amazing. And Oxford is, according to the Times Educational Supplement, the second best university in the world (after CIT, and before Cambridge, Stanford and MIT). It offers some of the most challenging undergraduate degrees in the world, which are, like most outstanding courses, focussed on challenging their students' intellectual complacency rather than reinforcing it.

Sorry to get all serious for a moment. But I get frustrated by lazy British journalists moaning about the disproportionate representation of Oxford in the professions. When you consider its world standing as a university, it is not that surprising. Nor do you hear British journalists moaning about how rubbish it is that Hillary Clinton went to Yale and how elitist that is or how she is entitled, intellectually superior and complacent or whatever. I think I'd rather that the President of the United States went to Yale than the alternative.

Of course I accept that there continue to be access issues to Oxbridge, for which the Social Mobility Foundaton squarely blames the variable quality of state school education in Britain, and not the universities, which they accept are entitled to and do recruit solely on the merit of the individuals assessed at the time they apply. It is worth bearing in mind that the average number of state school pupils at Oxbridge is still over 60%, and that a lot of other universities such as Bristol have similar proportions, though they very rarely get mentioned in the press as being part of the same problem.