In my youth, of course, they tended to try to do the opposite: to write the working class out of the story. England’s democracy seemed then to consist exclusively of grandees, most with titles. It was a view of democracy from the top downwards. Now, however, the fashionable view is increasingly from the bottom upwards. Thus the success or failure of England’s democracy, which in the old days was largely measured by the statesmanship of its leaders and the standing of the country, is now largely measured by the quality of the man in the street.
In this essay, mindful of Mao’s dictum about the fish rotting from the head downwards, I try to redress the balance, not, I hasten to say, so as to advocate reinstating the upper class – or anything as absurdly reactionary as that – but so as to highlight the gaping hole left in the head of our body politic by its extinction; its extinction, moreover, without any serious thought having been given to how, and with whom, that great empty hole should be filled. From time to time newspaper commentators amuse us by pretending that ‘Tony’s cronies’ have filled the hole. That only shows how little the role of the old ruling class, in the sense that it is used in this essay, is understood.
The difficulty here, I believe, is that ever since the problems created by the Industrial Revolution, political and social thinkers in Britain, as in the rest of the world, have been concerned exclusively with the condition of the tail – the poor and the underprivileged. And quite rightly so since, thanks to the Victorian reforms of the public schools, of Oxbridge, and of the Civil Service, the elites, by the end of the nineteenth century, were in pretty good shape. What so much more obviously and urgently needed attention was the quality of life, moral and material, not of the few but of the many.
Roughly speaking, that still remains the state of play today. While there have been endless studies of the demoralizing effects of inner-city living conditions, or of capitalism generally, on the poor and underprivileged, there have been none, so far as I know, of the demoralizing effects of gross suburban affluence in such towns as Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross – where there is a Mercedes and/or a BMW in every garage – and of capitalism generally on the rich and overprivileged.* No, I am not being facetious. Plato has a lot to say about the ideal conditions for nurturing elites, or what he called ‘guardians’. So, of course, famously, did Edmund Burke.
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 fund 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 Northcliffe. 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,