The measure of aristocracy, which in those days was mixed into a democratic soil, also did wonders for keeping down bureaucracy, which is one of the most worryingly invasive weeds in the democratic garden – only slightly less worrying than that other potentially poisonous growth, a standing army. For aristocracy and bureaucracy are natural enemies, as Matthew Arnold explained:
Aristocratic bodies have no taste for a very imposing executive, or for a very active and penetrating domestic administration. They have a sense of equality among themselves, and of constituting in themselves what is greatest and most dignified in the realm, which makes their pride revolt against the overshadowing greatness and dignity of a commanding executive. They have a temper of independence, and a habit of uncontrolled action, which makes them impatient of encountering, in the management of the interior concerns of the country, the machinery and regulations of a superior and peremptory power.
In other words, it is in the nature of aristocrats to want ‘to take jumped-up jacks in office down a peg or two’. In my childhood in the 1930s the grown-ups were always waging a relentless war against ‘faceless bureaucrats’, both religious and secular, either on their own behalf or on behalf of their many dependants. After hunting and shooting, it was their favourite sport. The less privileged classes, therefore, needed to feel no inhibition about turning to aristocrats for help. They were knocking on open palace doors. And in those days grandees were easy to locate and very far from being anonymous. Manifestly it was not an ideal system. But the present more democratic system of writing to newspapers, or of collecting masses of individual signatures for petitions, or of writing to the ombudsman, are not ideal either. For example, the residents of the village in which I now live are always writing to various ‘inspectors’ begging them to turn down some new threat or other – a new motorway service station, for example – seldom receiving more satisfaction than an official acknowledgement with an indecipherable signature. Of course, in theory, democratic numbers should be enough to impress central or local government officials; but in practice, I suspect, nothing will ever again be as effective, in this respect, as was the commanding voice of a member of the English upper class, ideally female.
Unhappy as some of my formative experiences were, all in all, it was a pretty good soil for someone wanting to go into public life to spring from; not altogether unlike those recommended by Burke and Schumpeter as ideal for nurturing future rulers. Right from the start I had felt at home – literally so – with the powerful who, therefore, held no terrors for me; right from the start I had had a sense of being part of a public process, of belonging to a civil association bound together by shared memories and traditions and – such being the degree of intermarriage – shared blood; above all, by an inherited and nurtured sense of public duty. Whereas for most citizens the idea of aspiring to national government seemed out of this world, beyond their dreams, for me it seemed the natural thing to do; rather more natural than not going into politics.
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