Guardian columnist John Harris muses on the contempt for other people displayed by Boris Johnson:

There are two elements to all this: one is Johnson’s Trumpish disdain for some of the most basic components of our democracy – the rule of law, scrutiny of the executive, an independent BBC (which he is now lashing out at yet again). The other is bound up with the prime minister’s apparently dim and disrespectful view of his fellow human beings – which, as revelations about Downing Street parties pile up, is now at the heart of our politics.

Both of those are Trumpish though. They’re very alike, but also very different – Trump entirely lacks that Etonian posh boy vibe that Johnson gets to use to his advantage. Johnson is vulgar in the way Etonian posh boys are and Trump is vulgar in the way crass boys from Queens are – the two are radically different.

Remember what a teacher at Eton wrote to his father in 1982: “Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.” A justified retort, of course, would be that this is the exact mindset that Eton is designed to produce – but even in that context, Johnson seemed to be in a league of his own.

Trump did not go to Eton, or Andover.

I recently read Sad Little Men, the writer Richard Beard’s eloquent book about private schools and the kind of leaders they produce, which shines light on Cameron and Johnson via his own story of an elite education. In his experience, contempt for the lower orders began with the idea that “everyone else was less special and often stupid”, and blurred into indifference: “We saw from car windows the petrol stations and primary schools and Bovis homes in which less privileged lives played themselves out, but the hopes and dreams of these people didn’t meaningfully exist for us, nor their disappointments and pain.”

Lords of the manor.