In the event, only one impediment stopped me: a lack of private means. Being a younger son, such money and property as there was went to my older brother, and it was he, rather than I, who could afford to take up public duties, culminating in his case — transcending even my grandmother’s record – in his becoming Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire. Being a younger son, I had instead to think of earning my own living, which soon lowered my sights. For to go into public life without independent means, or the spivvish knack of effortlessly making fast money – neither of which I possessed – necessitates in the aspirant a degree of unhealthily obsessive careerism, which thankfully I also lacked. My ambition, as befits anyone who is not financially independent, did not extend further than keeping myself and my young family afloat. Local government and local public service was just about possible, but – wholly on material grounds – national politics was a bridge too far. So I did the next best thing and joined The Times, which in those days was a kind of auxiliary public service, at least compared to the rest of Fleet Street. Those who worked for the paper saw the world from the general point of view of a member of the ruling class, whose judgements came from proximity to government rather than from the specialist outlook of the professional journalist. And while Times journalists did not rule out fierce disagreement with what a particular government might be doing, they did rule out any disagreement that might threaten the national interest. In writing a leader, one was always constrained to weigh one’s words with due consideration to the fact that the chancelleries of Europe* would be reading them. To that degree, Times leaders were State papers, far more than mere journalism, as I learnt to my cost since it meant that all one’s best phrases and arguments were ruthlessly removed. Something of this same sense of public responsibility could be found at the top end of all the professions in those days. I remember asking my stepfather what was the most important part of being Governor of the Bank of England. His reply was: ‘preventing dogs from fouling those legendary streets which fools suppose are paved with gold’. It was not enough just to be a good banker, or a good journalist –or a good lawyer, sportsman, or landowner, for that matter –since over and above all these specialist responsibilities there were the added obligations arising from membership of a privileged governing class. With the demise of that class, that extra sense of obligation has diminished, and nowhere more than at The Times. Nowadays Times journalists, like journalists in general, are closer to government than ever before. But where once upon a time this proximity was used to encourage greater understanding, on the principle of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, today it is used the better to take good aim at the ship of state before blowing her out of the water.
In any case, to work on The Times had been a vague ambition of mine ever since my Aunt Nell, with whom I used to stay while down from Cambridge early in the war, used me as a messenger to take up to London on Sunday night the letters, written over the weekend, with which she regularly bombarded her friends and relations in high places, one of whom happened then to be the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, who, finding a likely lad with the right connections in the anteroom to his office, had, in the way things used to happen in those days, taken me out to supper at Pratts. The rest, as they say, is history.
Not that I ever became a journalist in the contemporary adversarial sense, which allows for no scruples about rocking the boat. Having been brought up as a member of the governing class, for me it was a question of getting the balance right: the balance between causing mischief, which was permitted, and creating mayhem, which was not. No doubt I often failed to keep that balance but, unlike most of the journalists today, it was not through want of trying; of trying, that is, to put the public interest in discretion, and not washing too much dirty linen in public, before careerist self-indulgence and self-interest in ‘telling all’.
But even that may overstate my motive. For morality and manners are so intertwined in England that it is often difficult to know, in any particular case, which carries the most clout. In my journalistic career, it could well have been manners, since I would often invite VIPs to lunch at the Connaught Grill with every intention of trying to beguile them with sweetmeats into betraying State secrets and then, at the last moment over the coffee, brandy, and cigars draw back from asking the scoop-producing awkward question for fear of spoiling what until then had been such a convivial occasion. Most likely, therefore, I never spilled any valuable beans because I never had any to spill.
So in spite of not being myself in a financial position to transcend the demands of career advancement or organizational competitiveness, I nevertheless felt inescapably bound – almost against my will – to behave like a gentleman. Pride in gentlemanly status took precedence over greed and even over ambition. Gentlemanliness in those days was a high calling that a few tried to live up to because of genuine virtue, never cutting corners or taking the easy options and always obeying not so much the letter as the spirit of the law and spurning opportunities to make quick and easy money in favour of the more honourably won and longer-term gains; others because, being so well off, it was no skin off their nose to be high principled; but most, like me, did so out of a desire not to lose caste or, like an ever greater number, out of a desire to gain caste.
Most certainly it was not the most democratic way to fashion a governing class. For by linking the widespread desire to acquire social status to the performance of public duties and the upholding of professional values, it almost guaranteed and legitimized the continuation of hierarchy and social inequality. So if equality of access is to be regarded as essential for any morally acceptable system of recruitment into the political elite, this old way definitely does not pass that test. But judged by whether it serves the public interest by producing a regular supply of top-rank politicians, public servants, and professionals, did it pass that test? Tocqueville’s answer, as we have already seen, was emphatically affirmative: but that was in the early nineteenth century, and even then he was worried that England’s class system might not be able to do justice to the victims of the Industrial Revolution. Hence he qualified his encomium for the English aristocracy by writing ‘the miseries and privations of her poor almost equal [her aristocracy’s] power and renown’, which was certainly true at the time Tocqueville wrote; since then, however, there have been almost two centuries of progress for the poor under a social system that even to this day, is still accused of being unegalitarian and class ridden. So if the welfare of the poor was the only complaint Tocqueville had against the English class system –and it was – that fault has by now been rectified, at least as much as it has been rectified in the supposedly more classless societies of the United States and continental Europe. Yet there are still many voices here, now coming as much from the New Conservatives as from the New Labourites, in favour of even more anti-elitism and even more social equality, regardless of the fact that in the last two centuries as much has been done to eliminate what Tocqueville saw as the main virtue of England’s class system –its unrivalled success at furnishing honourable and enlightened men for public service – as has been done to eliminate what he saw as its main vice – a lack of concern about poverty.
Does this make sense? Will the war against poverty, which has been waged with astonishing success under what has remained of the old class system, be prosecuted more effectively by eliminating even more completely that old system? I don’t believe so. I believe that getting rid of the last vestiges of the old social system – the system which produced so many enlightened and honourable men for public service – will most significantly weaken the war against poverty, which required, and still requires, for its successful waging precisely the kind of enlightened, honourable public servants an increasingly classless society does not produce.
Conventional wisdom has it that getting rid of the last lingering remnants of the old hierarchy is a price well worth paying for greater equality of opportunity – that is, for more social, as against economic, equality. This essay seeks to challenge that assumption and to suggest instead that the closer the ideal of everybody having to start from scratch, without