I predict that the decision to send poor Prince George to Eton College will be yet another royal mistake. Why identify the poor innocent child with one of the most widely disliked institutions and groups of people in the country? If he is to be King, he must be King of us all. How can he be that, if he has been marked for life by this place as the member of a tiny social and political elite class?

For he will be. That is the point of these great boarding schools. Full disclosure: I speak as someone who attended a minor public school in the 1960s, and left it at 15, preferring a poorer education to the idea of spending three more years sleeping in dormitories (which Eton wisely does not require), wearing uniform and doing compulsory sport.

Education is surely for the daytime. Why should you have to live, eat and sleep with your classmates for half the year? When I recently spent a few days in a pretend prison for a TV reality show, one of the worst things about it was the lack of privacy and solitude, which reminded me so strongly of my boarding school years.

Before the disastrous arrival of Diana Spencer in the Royal Household, potential Kings were not sent to this faintly ridiculous establishment, which has been, for many decades, a wearisome symbol of what is wrong with this country.

For Eton is not just a public school. In fact, it probably isn’t a public school at all. It is a thing entirely on its own. By comparison with Eton, most of the schools called ‘public schools’ are nowadays as normal and modest as a boarding school can be.

Eton is a school for the sons of the very rich and the very grand, and for those whose parents aspire to be the same. Clever, troublesome boys may squeeze in – George Orwell was one such – but they must join in the pantomime of ridiculous Edwardian costumes, silly games, bizarre rules and exclusive clubs.

There is a telling passage in Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective mystery Murder Must Advertise in which the Old Etonian sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey (second son of a Duke) is asked by colleagues which schools he calls ‘public schools’. He answers ‘Eton’ and, after a meaningful pause, grudgingly adds ‘Harrow’.

He concedes that there is a decentish sort of establishment at Winchester ‘if you’re not too particular’. He sympathises with someone who has been to Marlborough, saying that there is ‘a terrible set of hearty roughs there’, and dismisses Rugby as a railway junction.

It is rather like the famous cover of the New Yorker magazine, in which Manhattan is the only real place, and everything else in the world is a scrawny or vague splodge on the map of the world.

And who can blame the school’s products for thinking this way? Etonians (do they still call their school ‘School’ because among friends it needs no name?) can and do fail in life. But there is a pretty good chance that they won’t, and that they will know, on first-name terms, a large part of the most significant people in the country. For me, Eton’s standing is a provocation because it was established, as a copy of its older brother, Winchester, to educate talented boys whose families had no money.

It was, in fact, founded as a grammar school, intended to be ‘the mirror and mistress of all other grammar schools’. I’ve enjoyed several visits there, speaking to pupils more than once, and attending a lovely dramatic reading of the ghost stories of M.R. James, who was once provost there. I’ve known a few Etonians, all of whom were human and some perfectly nice. I wish it no ill, though I think some conservative parents would be surprised to find how Left-wing and politically correct many of the teachers are.

I have met people who didn’t go there and wish they had, which I think very odd. I just don’t think it adds much to the greatness of Britain, and would offer as evidence my fellow columnist Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, who you either admire or don’t, and the second worst prime minister of our age, David Cameron, who nobody admires, both products of the ancient Windsor school.

Eton’s lost, half-forgotten purpose, of educating the clever children of the poor for the benefit of the nation, passed to others in 1944. The same job was tackled rather better by hundreds of academically selective state grammar schools across the country. These, despite what modish people try to tell you, were full of working-class boys and girls. By 1965, they were rivalling the great public schools in every area of endeavour, and storming Oxbridge too.

They were then closed by Labour, whose top deck was in those days crammed with public school men. And they were not seriously defended by the (often old Etonian) Tories. So back we went to the rollicking former age where money rules and those without it must put up with what they can get. Does King Charles really want to endorse this nasty system? Was it really such a success, for family, nation or Crown, when Princes Harry and William were signed up for Eton College?

The Royal Family was at its best in this country in the great days of King George V, and his son George VI, when it was middle-class, rather than glossily wealthy or aristocratic. King George V, with his stamp collection and his almost suburban life, was enjoyably unassuming. Nobody had to make him dwell in a modest house on the Sandringham estate. He did so by choice. His years in the Royal Navy, where he rose to command a cruiser, had knocked off all his corners, as it does.

A pity Andrew didn’t stay at sea. Like all our monarchs before the present King, who suffered at breezy, strenuous Gordonstoun, George V was educated by tutors and not sent to school. Given the current state of our exam system and universities, home schooling is probably not a bad idea. I don’t know how any modern child attending any British school could learn French to the standard attained by the late Queen Elizabeth, and the same goes for history and constitutional matters.

Maybe a couple of years at one of Northern Ireland’s superb surviving grammar schools might be a good compromise. Or perhaps a spell at one of the three great ‘lycees de la Montagne’, a trio of superb Paris day schools on the hill which rises above the Seine near the Latin Quarter. Or he might attend one of the great German grammar schools, known as gymnasiums. France and Germany have no Eton, and don’t suffer for it, in my view.

Then there is the Commonwealth, where the monarchy still finds a welcome. Australia and Canada have fine private schools, but they don’t come with the baggage of class distinction and privilege that Eton inevitably brings. I’m astonished that there is nobody in the Royal Household who can’t see the problem. The coming battle against Britain’s bitter and chilly republicans may turn out to have been lost on the playing fields of Eton.