In Defence of Aristocracy. Peregrine Worsthorne

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 even the privileges I enjoyed, is achieved, the greater will be the number who, like me, feel obliged, in large measure, to put their private and domestic responsibilities before their public duties – feel obliged, that is, to feather their own personal nests rather than to concern themselves with the public nest. In other words, the wider we open the gate that gives access to the political class, the fewer there will be who will want to pass through it.

      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 Wallington, 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.

Two

      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