I believe in meritocracy, just not merely intellectual meritocracy

I received what you could describe as a western elitist education. I went to Eton College, the 500-year-old private school in the UK whose pupils included Boris Johnson, Prince William, and everyone from Aldous Huxley to Percy Shelley. Then I went to Oxford University.

In both institutions, a huge emphasis is put on your intellectual performance under test. At Eton, all 250 boys in my year would gather in the school’s theatre on the last day of term, to be read the exam results, starting from the bottom and going up…