When I read that a group of Eton schoolboys had organised their own trip to meet President Putin and exchange portentous remarks in a big, posh Russian room, I could sense an expression crossing my face that I’m glad no one had to see. It must have been a kind of frowning, closed-eyed, open-mouthed, nauseated sneer.

I could feel my jowls attempt to detach themselves from my head. My nostrils seemed to be trying to put some distance between one another, while my eyebrows were huddling together for comfort. Of the words that escaped the weird-shaped hole my mouth had become, “oh” and “those” were the only ones this newspaper hasn’t recently resolved not to print without indisputable editorial justification.

I did not rejoice in the young people’s adventure. The pictures of them smartly greeting Russia’s puffy little tyrant, and lounging across the floor of an anteroom making wacky hand gestures, didn’t make me think, “Good on them!” Instead I was filled with loathing, which isn’t very nice of me because they’re basically children and they haven’t really done any harm.

Public schoolboys are endlessly encouraged to show this sort of vacuous initiative

That’s not to say they did any good. Putin will feel his regime came out of it well. One of the boys was reportedly quoted in a pro-Putin newspaper (how accurately, we can’t know) saying: “Personally, I think that Putin is right to continue defending Assad in his role as president.” Meanwhile, on Facebook, Trenton Bricken, a member of the group, described Russia’s leader as “small in person but not in presence” and David Wei, who seems to have been the jaunt’s chief organiser, wrote: “Guys, we truly gave Putin a deep impression of us and he responded by showing us his human face.” So rumours the president carries the severed face of a rival are true, then.

They obviously think he’s great. But that’s hardly surprising: they’re teenagers and he’s the president of Russia and he was nice to them. They’re not in the business of speaking truth to power, but getting amazing selfies. I’d be the same at their age – I’d probably be the same now. I refuse to think more of them for all this but I’m going to really try not to think less, particularly as public schoolboys are endlessly encouraged to show this sort of vacuous initiative.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Which is why Eton college’s response is suspect. “This was a private visit by a small group of boys organised entirely at their own initiative and independently of the college,” it said. I’m not saying that’s a lie – I’m sure the school didn’t set up the trip – but Eton has a tradition of encouraging pupils to organise societies and events, and this must be exactly the kind of stunt it dreams of its charges getting up to.

“Wow! They met the PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA!? How the hell did they do that?!” would be a more natural response. Instead, the college’s line is so dry and dignified as to be a parody of dry dignity. “We can’t be expected to keep track of every single time our boys meet up with the leader of a superpower,” is the tone and it’s disingenuous. It’s all a bit “Fog in channel, continent isolated.” Stiff upper-lipped establishment reserve masking feverish excitement at its own coolness.

And it suits Eton very well for people to think that this trip is the kind of dynamic thing that Etonians just do. It subtly reinforces the notion that Eton’s pupils are made of more enterprising stuff than normal schoolchildren – that there’s something special about them apart from their parents’ money and connections, and their own consequent sense of entitlement. The college couldn’t possibly assert this view openly – it would be met with ridicule and offence in equal measure – but its over-understated response to the boys’ headline-grabbing antics is a clear invitation for us to infer it.

I used to like Eton. As a pupil at a minor public school, I admired it as the independent sector’s market leader. I didn’t think private education was evil – I still don’t – and Eton’s continued prominence felt picturesque and reassuring.

Then suddenly, a couple of years ago, I noticed my feelings had changed. My wife and I were driving through the town of Eton – just sightseeing, we’d spent the morning wandering round Windsor – and, as I looked at the beautiful buildings, the inextricability of town and school, the royal castle in the background, the heady mixture of history, wealth and confidence, my face started imitating the gargoyles.

As my sneer of envy, disdain and rage subsided, I realised there’d been a much more significant alteration in my outlook than losing my taste for one public school. It had crept up on me over the previous decade. It struck me that, when I was growing up, when I looked fondly on institutions like Eton, it was on the basis that they were ultimately doomed. They were relics of a more spacious age, an aesthetically attractive one, also an unjust one, but crucially, one that was over. For better or worse, and largely for better, history was leaving them behind.

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I was brought up with the general postwar assumption that Britain was getting fairer. It was taken for granted – by parents and teachers alike. There might be a nuclear war, oil might run out but, failing that, moral progress was assured. In the old days, the elderly didn’t have pensions, now they did; women didn’t have careers, now they did; poor people didn’t have access to healthcare, now they did. Etc, etc, etc. Change might be happening too slowly but it was happening inexorably and exclusively in the right direction.

I didn’t notice the moment when I lost that assumption – it was probably between the Iraq war and the credit crunch – but when we were driving through Eton, it hit me hard. I remembered the complacent feeling of advancing justice with which I’d once looked fondly on the crumbling beauty of institutions like Eton, and I felt tricked.

The British are a nostalgic people: we love costume drama, ancient buildings, stories of kings, tradition. But I realised in Eton that there was a context for these fond backward glances and that context was progress. Progress towards a fairer society.

Who still believes that fairness is advancing? Britain’s period of greatest social justice is probably already over. The sun isn’t setting on the lichen-pocked crenellations of Eton, but on the NHS and the BBC. And they won’t be remembered in a spirit of bittersweet, misty-eyed nostalgia, but with straightforward grief.