Is Burnham’s Oxbridge-heavy cabinet a sign of social mobility or lack of progress on class?

Andy Burnham holds his first cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The prime minister’s top ministers ought to be competent – do they need to be representative too? Photograph: WPA/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Andy Burnham holds his first cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The prime minister’s top ministers ought to be competent – do they need to be representative too? Photograph: WPA/Getty Images Analysis Is Burnham’s Oxbridge-heavy cabinet a sign of social mobility or lack of progress on class? Esther Addley PM’s team can be seen as backward step even though in some ways it is more diverse. Yet its makeup points to wider access to power Race, school, gender: the makeup of Andy Burnham’s cabinet – in charts Like 20 British prime ministers before him, Andy Burnham’s new cabinet minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, went to Eton. After graduating from the country’s most elite private school, Narayan attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied – what else? – PPE (politics, philosophy and economics), like David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, Ed Miliband and a host of other senior politicians . An MBA at Stanford and a career in the City followed. But Narayan’s background is hardly typical of the British ruling class . Born in Behar in eastern India, he moved with his family to Cardiff when he was 12. He and his younger brother were sleeping on the floor of their one-bedroom home when a teacher at his local high school suggested the bright young boy apply for some private schools. His parents, who had joined the Labour party almost as soon as they arrived in Wales, ran a petrol station. Eton was possible only thanks to a full scholarship. Graphic Class and representation in 21st-century Britain can be complicated. By some yardsticks, for example, the makeup of Burnham’s ministerial team , which was announced after he became prime minister on Monday, could be seen as a backward step. More than a fifth of his cabinet attended private schools for most of their education – at times, under Keir Starmer, every senior minister went to a state school. And a remarkable 54% of the ministers now leading government policy went to Oxford or Cambridge, up from 29% under Starmer. (Nationally, the figure is 1%.) In other ways, however, Burnham’s top team is more diverse than before, with half of those attending cabinet – including, of course, the PM – representing northern constituencies. And for the first time in history, the cabinet has equal numbers of women and men. One of them, the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is among those who were educated privately – this after she and her family arrived in Britain as asylum seekers from Liberia in 1986. How much does all of this matter? The prime minister’s top ministers ought to be competent – do they need to be representative too? To Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust , which works to promote social mobility, the answer is an emphatic yes. “Of course, the background of the cabinet matters. If they’re meant