These are the problems this essay will try to address, from the standpoint of an author who was lucky enough in his youth to inherit a place – albeit a very junior one – in the old aristocracy and lucky and ambitious enough in adulthood to win membership, as a newspaper editor, of the new meritocracy; from the standpoint, that is, of someone in a position to make a comparative judgement as to which method of choosing a political class brings the best results. If by ‘best’ is meant ‘the most morally acceptable’, the jury is very much still out. For it is by no means certain that the more egalitarian of the two manners of selection is the most popular. Rather the opposite. Far from meritocrats gaining legitimacy more easily than their aristocratic predecessors – as was expected – the opposite seems to be happening. Whereas everybody loved a lord, nobody loves a meritocrat. Possibly this will change. But on present evidence, the possibility has to be faced that democracy and social equality may not be the natural allies they were supposed to be. It could even be that ‘the common people’ just don’t want to be governed by their more successful brothers and sisters.
If, however, ‘best’ is meant in the sense of serving the nation best, there is only one answer. The trouble is, that those who could bear witness to the superiority of the old aristocracy over the new meritocracy – and their number includes quite as many bottom dogs as top dogs – are now mostly dead, and the few who are still alive feel inhibited by today’s egalitarian Zeitgeist from doing so. That is the reason for this essay: to break out from the conspiracy of forgetfulness by reminding people that in living memory Britain once had an upper class – from which most of the politicians were drawn – which was the envy of the world. For as a result of this method of selection, Britain’s political class had inherited enough in-built authority – honed over three centuries – and enough ancestral wisdom – acquired over the same period – to dare to defy both the arrogance of intellectuals from above and the emotions of the masses from below; to dare to resist the entrepreneurial imperative; to dare to try to raise the level of public conversation; to dare to put the public interest before private interests; and to dare to try to shape the nation’s will and curb its appetites. To such a political class conserving the patrimony came naturally, as did the habit of using money to transcend money. Then, most precious asset of all, because its future did not depend wholly on winning votes, Britain’s political class could do for demos what courtiers could never do for princes: be a true friend rather than a false flatterer*. Also deserving of mention is the elevating effect on British governance generally of its being embedded in an aristocracy through whose park gates could be glimpsed the whole beauty and charm of English history, and the civilizing effect of having a long-established model of high life – celebrated and chronicled by great writers, from Shakespeare to Evelyn Waugh, and portrayed by great painters of every age – that all classes could aspire to share, at least in their dreams. After a visit to the great historian G. M. Trevelyan’s older brother, Sir Charles Trevelyan,† at Wellington, the family home in Northumberland, A. L. Rowse – himself a distinguished historian from a working-class Cornish background – confided to his diary that the house ‘gave him the feeling of how fascinating it would be to belong to a family like that, rich in interest, intelligence, history’.‡ Many thousands of National Trust members who visit stately homes today will be able to identify with this fascination; a fascination that does not spring from envy but from a genuine pride in the existence of such houses and such families.
How can a meritocracy, the political elite of which is likely to change with every generation and to have nothing in common except a shared ability to climb to the top of one of the various ladders of upward mobility, ever hope to enjoy comparable authority? By comparison with the old aristocracy, it is almost bound – unless and until it has had time to develop an authoritative aura of its own – to seem grey, formless, fissiparous, and messy, without colour or character, which is precisely how, starting with C. P. Snow’s series of novels in the 1950s and 1960s, it has gone on being portrayed in countless other novels and TV series ever since.*
Over thirty years ago, President Kennedy looked forward in a speech† to ‘a world that will not only be safe for democracy and diversity but also for distinction’ (my italics). I like to think – having known him a bit – that what he would have wished to say, had his courage extended that far, was that he looked forward to a world that would be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for ‘aristocracy’, since, as I try to show in a later chapter, President Kennedy, more than any of his predecessors in the White House, as much in his style as in his rhetoric, set out quite consciously to give at least an aristocratic appearance to America’s democratic leadership – just at the very time in the 1960s when the ‘angry’ movement to eliminate aristocracy – ‘that poisonous virus’ – from the British body politic began to gain serious momentum.
The English aristocracy is perhaps the most liberal that has ever existed, and no body of men has ever, uninterruptedly, furnished so many honourable and enlightened individuals to the government of a country.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume i
Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic in the world.
Macaulay
I, at least, would rather have been governed by Lord Shaftesbury than Mr Cobden, by the gentlemen of England than by the Gradgrinds or Bounderbys of Coketown. There was something picturesque about his thick headiness, something monumental about his complacency. Compare him with the elegant trifler who was the gentleman of the ancien regime, or the rigid disciplinarian whom the German aristocracy provided, and he shines in comparison. He was often capable of a generous gesture. He was frequently tolerant, there could be about him a fine quixotism which was difficult not to admire. He threw up odd men of genius like Byron and Henry Cavendish, statesmen of public spirit like Lord John Russell and Hartington; he would found great galleries and establish the British Museum. He was very costly, and, in the mass depressing and dull. Yet, through it all, he always had the saving grace of a sense of humour … Nor is it certain that we shall replace him by a more admirable type … The gentle-man scourged us with whips. We must beware lest our new masters drive us to our toil with scorpions.
Harold J. Laski, the famously left wing Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, in his The Dangers of Being a, Gentleman, Basis Books, 1940
This essay will show: (1) why the aristocratic tradition peculiar to Britain, owing more to manners than to law, more to a religion of good behaviour than to any ideology, and most of all to a particular set of aristocrats at a particular moment in English history, is integral to the spirit of our English constitution; and (2) how getting rid of that tradition is not going to be at all like unburdening the body politic of a heavy handicap, and therefore facilitating its progress into the new millennium, but much more akin to the extraction of an essential organ without which it can no longer healthily survive: as potentially divisive and anarchic in its consequences as was France’s violent liquidation of its aristocracy in 1789, from which she did not recover balance and cohesion until Charles de Gaulle, after two empires, three revolutions and four republics, reunited the nation and restored its sanity in 1945, over a century and a half later.
A generation ago, such alarmism would have seemed absurdly pessimistic. Shortly after the last war my old tutor, Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished historian, published a little book called The Englishman and his History, in which he wrote: ‘When the aristocracy were