To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect oneself; to be habituated to censorial inspection of the public eye … to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw on the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found … these are the circumstances of men that form what I call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.
Nor does one need to go back to the eighteenth century or to classical Athens for such comments. For the great twentieth-century thinker and economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his famous Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943), has this to say:
There are many ways in which politicians of a sufficiently good quality can be secured. Thus far, however, experience seems to suggest that the only effective guarantee is in the existence of a social stratum itself a product of a severely selective process, that takes to politics as a matter of course. If such a stratum be neither too exclusive nor too accessible for the outsider and if it be strong enough to assimilate most of the elements it currently absorbs, it not only will present for the political career products of stocks that have successfully passed many tests in other fields – served, as it were, an apprenticeship in private affairs – but it will also increase their fitness by endowing them with traditions that embody experience, with a professional code and with a common fond of views.
Schumpeter’s words ‘Thus Far’ were written during the war, but as far as I know there has been no evidence since then to suggest that we have found any better ways. Quite the opposite, judging by the quality of today’s leaders. But when did you last hear a contemporary politician – even a Tory one – admit as much? Nor is this in the least surprising, since to do so would be committing political suicide.
While in the old days socialists argued, very reasonably, that it was the duty of the State to improve the conditions of the lower classes, and Old Tories argued, also very reasonably, that it was their party’s duty to maintain the privileges of the upper classes (and the liberals made a powerful case for not feather-bedding either the Duke or the dustman), today all the parties agree, or pretend to agree, that it is the job of the State to do away with class altogether, quite regardless of the fact that our political institutions (c.f. Mao’s head) grew out of that class system and have depended on it ever since for their health and strength.
But having been brought up among the upper class myself, perhaps it is only natural for me to be aware of that class’s strengths and virtues rather than its limitations. I don’t think so. For as it happens, fate dealt me a very mixed hand of class cards, which I like to think has made it easier for me than for others to achieve a degree of objectivity. But in case that is wishful thinking on my part, it is probably wisest to take the opportunity at the outset to lay my class cards face up on the table, so that readers of the essay can swallow it with as large or as little a pinch of salt as they deem desirable or necessary.
My grandfather, Alexander Koch de Gooreynd, came from Belgian banking stock, his father having emigrated here at the end of the nineteenth century. Having arrived, he bought a house in Belgrave Square and then built his wife another and tried – only being just nipped in the bud by the Astor family – to buy The Times from Lord North-cliffe. After Sending my father to Eton and into the Irish Guards, my grandfather then put the final touches to my father’s rites of passage into the upper class by arranging for him to marry my mother, granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon – a Catholic family connected by marriage to the Duke of Norfolk, secular head of the Catholic establishment. The marriage, however, did not work since the couple were incompatible, my father wanting to lead the life of the idle rich and my mother, much the stronger character, determined to shoehorn him into English public life. The poor man was found a parliamentary constituency by our uncle Edmund Fitzalan, (younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk), the Tory Chief Whip at the time, and did his best – changing his name to Worsthorne* for the purpose – but it didn’t work. And after several unsuccessful attempts, he gave up the struggle and the name. My mother, who despised the idle rich, never forgave him and they soon separated.
From then on, so terrified was my mother that my brother and I might follow in our father’s self-indulgent footsteps that during our childhood we were scarcely ever allowed to see him. I remember being taken out from school in his yellow Rolls Royce,† equipped ahead of the times with a cocktail bar, at the most twice, and that, alas, was the total extent, until we came of age, of our contact. Not so much a role model, therefore, as an anti-role model. We were brought up to be as unlike our father as possible, even to the point of not being sent to Eton and not being allowed to join the Irish Guards.
Then, in the 1930s, our mother got her heart’s desire. She married the man of her dreams, Montagu Norman, then the great interwar Governor of the Bank of England, as dedicated to public service as our father was to private pleasure. Norman, unlike our father, was Protestant, which meant divorce and remarriage in a registry office, both repugnant to our recusant Catholic relations, from whose presence my mother – to her great relief – and her children were summarily banished for life: for my brother and I, this meant, in turn, no more Christmases and holidays with Uncle Edmund at Cumberland Lodge, his grace-and-favour home in Windsor Park – where guests included George V and Queen Mary, as well as the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin – or at Arundel Castle; and no more eavesdropping as our elders and betters discussed ad nauseam the Conversion of England, the future of the Catholic schools, and other such burning public issues of the day. But instead, being thenceforward under Montagu Norman’s roof, we soon became equally accustomed to hear talk about more secular public issues – the Gold Standard, unemployment, etc., with visitors like Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic guru, Sir John Reith, the first Director General of the BBC, and Maynard Keynes. So from a very early age, res publica, ‘the public thing’, was part of our lives.
I can remember quite clearly when I was made aware that it was not part of everybody else’s life. The parents of a fellow pupil at my prep school had taken me out and in the course of the outing my friend’s father, who was in the rag trade, had waxed indignant about a Neville Chamberlain Budget. Always anxious to find some precociously grownup subject to write about to my mother in my weekly letter home, I passed on this conversation, mentioning in particular the father’s objection to a tax rise that would hit the retail trade particularly hard, only to receive a long handwritten letter – the first and the last – from the Governor himself. Sadly, I haven’t kept the text, but its gist left a lasting mark. The Chancellor’s job, he emphasized, was not to please the rag trade, or any other private interest, but rather to take care of the nation’s solvency. A good Budget was almost by definition an unpopular Budget. He went on to cite his friend Walter Lippmann’s view that it was a government’s job to tax, conscript, command and prohibit, punish, and balance the budget, none of which responsibilities could usually be safely fulfilled without offending many individual members of the public. Inevitably, the conflict between the public interest and the private interest was most acute in time of war, when the balance had to be got right between the public interest in victory and the private interest of millions of mothers and fathers that their boys should return home alive; but in peacetime, too, there could be almost equally agonizing conflicts and he instanced his own recent duty at the Bank of England to take actions in the national interest that had inflicted cruel suffering on the unemployed.
Very recently, in Louis Menand’s excellent book The Metaphysical Club – mostly about late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American philosophers – I came across a ruling of the famous American Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,