This is not intended as a list of awful people. Some very good friends of mine were privately educated. So were some of my all-time heroes: people like Rik Mayall, Armando Iannucci and Philip Pullman (to name a few).

But there are an eye-watering number of people on this list who have damaged the UK in some way, restricted your rights, curtailed your horizons, made you poorer and/or stolen your hopes and dreams. Many of them are, let’s face it, thick as mince and wouldn’t have achieved anything in life had they not been born into money and promoted way beyond their abilities by their old school chums. A disturbing number of them are out-and-out psychopaths, perhaps as a by-product of their arguably cruel and unusual schooling.

Private schools pay little to no tax, they don’t have to be inspected by Ofsted if they don’t want to be, and they are not required to follow the national curriculum. The teachers don’t even have to be qualified! Little wonder they seem to create more than their fair share of damaged (yet powerful) people.

Whichever way you look at it, the 7% of the population who were privately educated dominate public life in the UK to a truly shocking extent, muscling out the 93% of us who attended state schools from politics, the media, showbiz, the arts, elite sports, and a truly scandalous number of top jobs.

Just look at the list below.

There exists a well-worn VIP lane for life… if you’re fortunate enough to be born into it.