Before Josh Hawley became known for leading the attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the US Congress, he taught at St Paul’s, the elite British school for boys where he spent a year working, and where he was remembered by staff and pupils as an aloof, right-wing political obsessive who made himself popcorn to watch the US invasion of Iraq.
The Republican senator from Missouri has been the target of ire for millions of Americans since he became the first senator to say he would object to the election results. 146 Republicans joined the lawmaker in seeking to block votes from Pennsylvania and Arizona from being counted, an extraordinary manoeuvre that was seen as stoking the flames of a pro-Trump mob who attacked the US Capitol.
Before the assault, Hawley was photographed walking past the crowd and raising his fist in salute to them.
While Hawley has painted himself as a man of the ‘American heartland’, and has expressed contempt for what he says is the US’s liberal ‘elite’, the graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School spent a year in Barnes in 2002, at top all-boys private school St Paul’s.
An examination of his time there has found that Hawley was not the first choice to serve as a ‘Colet Fellow’ at the prestigious school. But he persuaded the interview board with what some called his intellectual rigour and drive.
Hawley taught A-Level politics jointly with Rob Jones, a left-wing former policeman who was described fondly when he left in the school magazine as ‘able to create a fearsome reputation, but is also worshipped by his students. There cannot be many who have their own Facebook appreciation society.’
The teaching style of the pair, former pupils said, was combative. It was apparent that Jones was on the left and Hawley on the right. ‘Rob had him take some lessons, then he would sit with the boys and throw grenades every so often,’ said one.
Jack, a former student who is himself now a teacher, explained further: ‘Jones and Hawley would sit on opposite sides of the classroom. We’d get these photocopies of, you know, excerpts from Nietzsche or Marx or John Locke, for ideologies, given them in advance and told to highlight them. Then it was a debate, a discussion, about what conservatives think about society, is nationalism inherently aggressive, and so on and so on.’
