‘It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” Gore Vidal’s waspish hopes for his friends captures, in an epigram, why Theresa May does not really mean what she says about meritocracy. Meritocracy does not mean meritocracy. At the beginning of their time in office every prime minister has to make the meritocracy speech. The ardour always fades because, looked at straight on, meritocracy is a radical and terrifying idea.

The term itself was designed as a warning rather than an aspiration. Michael Young wrote The Rise Of The Meritocracy in 1958 to raise the alarm that a society based on a narrow definition of merit, embodied in an intelligence test at an early age, is a terrible place to live. Young’s meritocracy descends into