As world leaders gathered for the G7 meeting in Cornwall, there has been a lot of posturing. Leaders showing off body language designed to place them in some form of hierarchy. Whether it’s the friendly hand on a shoulder from Biden, who is, in an animal sense, showing his superiority to an inferior, or the intense hand signals and jokes of Trudeau and the intentional breaching of personal space between him and other leaders as a way of being accepted into the “pack”. It all smacks of posturing for a place at the top of the hierarchy.

An interesting incident on camera was Angela Merkel’s refusal to bump elbows with Boris Johnson, an obvious snub. It may not have been intentional, only she will know. But I cannot help thinking that our leader, the tousle-haired, stooping man in a badly fitting suit looked lost, subservient and way out of his depth. His whole demeanour seemed to be wrong for such an occasion and his off the cuff remarks about “building back better” were an embarrassment.

Yet we know that Johnson went to, supposedly, the most exclusive private school for boys, Eton. A school that has provided more Prime Ministers than any other. So how can such an exclusive education not deliver a confident, statesmanlike world leader?

The teaching at Eton is, by all accounts, excellent. I have only visited the school once, many years ago, to see a trainee teaching. It looks, feels, and indeed smells every inch a long-established historically important place. That said it also had excellent modern facilities. The teachers were warm and welcoming, their subject knowledge excellent and their examination results first class – they still are. Perhaps that is the problem. Education, as I have stated many times, is so much more than knowing about things and passing exams.

Exams are only one measure of how well a person has been educated. That said, Eton does much more than simply hothouse young boys through examinations. They have facilities and clubs for all sorts of non-academic things from rowing to fencing, philosophy, classics and much more. Again, perhaps that is part of the problem? Eton teaches its boys about the best things in life, the high arts, the classics, the elite sports – but how much does it educate its boys about the lives and experiences of most people?

Being able to conjugate Latin verbs or retell classical Greek myths is just a party trick if you have no understanding of people, their lives, troubles and tribulations. It’s far too easy for politicians to be insulated from reality when they live in the Westminster bubble and surround themselves with like-minded thinkers. Johnson’s actions now and in previous political and non-political jobs smack of hypocrisy. It’s a life of do as I say, not as I do. The party that chastised people for having more children than they can afford and so limited child support, now has a leader who complains that he cannot afford to live on a Prime Minister’s salary and needs at least £300,000 a year to make ends meet.

That same party, which voted down attempts to make landlords provide accommodation that’s fit for human habitation as a minimum, has members who secretly donate tens of thousands of pounds to redecorate a perfectly habitable flat with items beyond the means of 95 per cent (or more) of the population. A £30,000 per year allowance was not enough.

One statement made recently by Boris Johnson infuriated me. He claimed that those who benefit from private tuition do so because their parents worked hard to afford such things. The implication is that those who cannot afford tuition for their children simply need to work a bit harder to get the money to do so.

That statement insults every hardworking parent who is on minimum wage or who must undertake two jobs to make ends meet. It insults every person who takes a job not for greed but for the common good, it assumes that if you are in a low-paid job then, quite simply, you should get a better job and stop complaining. It ignores the fact that if we all demanded jobs that paid £100,000 plus there would be nobody to keep society running.

He also missed the glaring own goal he scored with his statement. If his government properly funded education, delivered real terms increases in pupil spending, looked after the fabric of our schools, paid hardworking teachers, teaching assistants, technicians and school office staff a wage commensurate with their hard work, there’d be no need for tutoring. Schools would be able to reduce class sizes, employ more teachers and have facilities that emulate the best facilities the private sector can offer.