LORD Waldegrave, provost of Eton, has threatened to resign from the Conservative party if proposals to make it mandatory for employers to ask job candidates if they received a private education come into force.

Lord Waldegrave says this would mean that appointments to top jobs would then be made “…not on merit but on social engineering.” He added, “It is wrong to punish children for decisions taken by their parents. Besides, the ablest candidates come from all backgrounds.” And he speculated that if these proposals had been policy earlier, Winston Churchill might have been denied a job in government when it was learnt he had been to school at Harrow.

It is interesting to see what questions employers are not allowed to ask potential employees: their country of origin, their religion or their sexual orientation, for example. Candidates must not be asked whether they are married or have, or plan to have, children. A prospective employer is not allowed to ask a candidate’s age or, for instance, to say, “How many more years do you see yourself in the workforce?”

It is not permitted to ask people with a disability if this would restrict their performance, for that would be officially classed as Disability Discrimination. An employer may not ask candidates how much they drink, whether they smoke or use “recreational drugs.”

All these restrictions leave the employer at a serious disadvantage when it comes to finding out anything at all about an applicant’s suitability. A boss trying to decide whether to give me a job is about to make a very considerable outlay in terms of money and trust. Surely, the boss might fairly like to know whether I have a chronic illness or a poor timekeeping record in previous jobs? Of course, all employers hope to recruit the most suitable to join their staff, so now perhaps they will resort to having at all interviews an undercover detective to “deduce” from candidates’ appearance, verbal slips etc whether, for example, one might be a closet kleptomaniac and another take the job, intending to clear off after three months, start a family and claim maternity leave.

A bank manager may not ask a man applying to work in the bank’s investment advice department whether he is a member of the Communist party. Or a woman with a foreign name and a Middle East accent and applying to be a company’s head of security if she ever had any links with a terrorist organisation. Surely these would be perceived deficits which any employer has an interest in knowing about? Then, amid all you’re not allowed to ask, the mandatory killer questions: “Did you go to prep school, Marmaduke? Didn’t your parents pay for you to attend Roedean, Cordelia?”

It’s a bit of a showstopper to discover that the bloke behind all this social engineering, provoking the provost of Eton’s threat to leave the party is the most famous living Old Etonian, Dave Cameron. He claims it will “improve social mobility.” But these tiresome proposals have nothing to do with social mobility and they won’t better the lot of a single child from the inner city. This is class war waged by the Cameron-Osborne pantomime horse which has decided, for a lark, to position its social policy to the left of Labour. Move over Jeremy Corbyn. We don’t need you when we’ve got Dave.