Mandelson was right, strictly speaking, but he missed the wider point. The billionaires strongly denied accusations that they had been involved in corrupt arms sales to India and no court had found them guilty beyond reasonable doubt of any offence. But if you see billionaires facing accusations of playing a part in an arms scandal, you are under no obligation to start worrying about the burden of proof any more than you are obliged to hire a plumber your neighbours have warned you is dodgy. Why not just smile politely and cross the street?
The same question haunts David Blunkett’s infatuation with a woman who appears to have been the result of a union between a diamond mine and a hotel chain. If the name ‘Kimberley Fortier’ wasn’t warning enough, then her job as publisher of the conservative Spectator ought to have told a Labour minister that the fling could not end well.
The fault may have been with Blunkett’s civil servants, who perhaps skipped the fashion pages when they read the morning newspapers to their blind master. They may have thought that the Home Secretary had more pressing matters to concern him, and missed the piece in which Fortier described how she used the pull of her husband, the publisher of Vogue, to jump a nine-month waiting list for an £11,000 Birkin bag. He ‘moved heaven and earth to get her a Birkin within two months,’ reported the Observer, ‘sneaking her into the shop one night after closing to allow her to examine the bag, only to have her say: “It’s the wrong one. It’s light brown. I want the dark brown one.”’
If it is bigoted to pass on the pleasure of such company, then good taste is bigotry
In years to come historians will conclude that New Labour had a fatal weakness. It lacked a wise aunt to save it from itself. There was no one to collar ministers and bellow, ‘David, you sit there and tell me you haven’t got enough sense to run a mile from a girl who calls herself Kimberley Fortier?’
New Statesman, December 2004
* Tessa Jowell was the Labour minister who pushed through the deregulation of gambling. Her husband, David Mills, set up offshore trusts for Silvio Berlusconi in the early nineties. Italian magistrates investigating tax fraud and money laundering tried to prosecute him. They were suspicious because one woman was a director or company secretary of nineteen of the companies. It is hard enough for the most qualified woman to manage nineteen companies; harder still when the woman in question was a single mother from an East End council estate.
† After this piece appeared, Charles Powell wrote to me to explain that although his pronunciation of ‘Powell’ could sound like ‘Pole’ to the careless listener he in fact called himself ‘Pohwell’. He was perfectly entitled to do so. His family was from Wales and his paternal grandfather pronounced ‘Powell’ as ‘Pohwell’, as many in Wales do to this day. Far from being a snob, his grandfather was a clergyman who despised the vanities of this world. Jonathan Powell began life by pronouncing ‘Powell’ as ‘Pohwell’ but slipped into ‘Powell’ as his career advanced. On this reading, the affectation lies with Jonathan for adopting the blokey pronunciation ‘Powell’ the better to fit in with the compulsory informality of the new establishment. But maybe not. It is easy to get lost in this country’s class system.
*The Hinduja brothers—Srichand, Gopichand and Prakash—were Indian billionaires, who, like so many other rich men, based themselves in London because of the tax breaks Gordon Brown gave the wealthy. They sponsored the Faith Zone in the Millennium Dome and announced that they believed in ‘multicultural and interfaith understanding, tolerance and respect between the different people and their faith’. As the cynical would expect, the promoters of understanding, tolerance and respect were also involved in the supply of military vehicles. While New Labour was trying to raise funds for the Dome in 1999, the Indian authorities were accusing them of being involved in a corrupt arms deal. They claimed the charges were politically motivated, and an Indian court threw them out in 2005. Tony Blair sacked Peter Mandelson from his government in 2001 after press claims that Mandelson lobbied on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, who was seeking British citizenship.
The Cool Rich and the Dumb Poor
TO SAY THAT today’s Britain is a class-ridden country dominated by hereditary elites is to invite incredulous ridicule. No one in a position of power supports privilege any more. John Major announced his determination to achieve a ‘classless society’ more than a decade ago. Tony Blair declared in 1997 that ‘the Britain of the elite is over’. In the 2005 election campaign, New Labour announced that it was on the side of ‘hard-working families’ while the old Tories claimed to be the voice of ‘the forgotten majority’. Both agreed that the old notions of hierarchy were dead.
Once the newspapers the British read and the television programmes they watched were social markers. Today the old gap between middle and upmarket newspapers is vanishing, and if it were not for the ads, no one would be able to tell the difference between the BBC and commercial television. When what we once called ‘society’ drops its aitches and affects an estuary accent, it is possible to imagine a future when the queen will be the last person left speaking the Queen’s English.
All social and cultural institutions are emphatic in their commitment to egalitarianism.* The BBC’s Diversity Unit promises not only to tackle colour prejudice, but an apparently exhaustive list of other bigotries about ‘age, gender, race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, marital status, sexual orientation and number of dependants’. In Whitehall, the Civil Service says it will end the under-representation of women and members of ethnic minorities among its upper ranks. The NHS announces that its ambitions are not limited to the petty task of providing care for the sick, free at the point of delivery. It intends to go farther and create ‘a fairer society in which everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their potential’.
A foreigner who hears the declarations of solidarity with the masses would assume this country was in the grip of red revolution, so thoroughly does the egalitarian style dominate public life. Radical human-resources managers and anti-elitist mandarins make good money out of a career in leftism, as long as they never talk about the old left’s central concern: class. For embarrassingly good reasons it has become unmentionable.
In the late fifties, Harold Macmillan found ministerial jobs for the duke of Devonshire and the noble Lords Carrington, Dundee, Gosford, Home, Lansdowne and Munster. In 2004 Cherie Blair said, ‘Whoever’s calling the shots in this country, it isn’t the people on the grouse moor.’ Indeed it is not; the aristocratic order and the old class system are gone. But here’s what is odd: a child born in 1958 into the Britain of Harold Macmillan and his dukes and lords was far more likely to break away from his class and pursue a career that reflected his talents than a child born in 1970. As John Major’s classless society dawned, class divisions were hardening. The more Tony Blair insisted that elitism was over, the prouder elites became.
Far from being a meritocracy, Britain has become a country of castes, and the divisions between them are widening with each decade. The children of the rich remain rich when they grow up. The children of graduates graduate themselves; meanwhile the children of the working and lower-middle classes sink ever farther into financial and intellectual impoverishment.
A series of studies for the Sutton Trust looked at the fate of newborn children through schooling to adulthood. On average, a boy born to a well-to-do family in 1958 earned 17.5 per cent more than a boy born to a family on half the income. If the equivalent Mr and Mrs Moneybags produced a son in 1970, he would grow up to earn 25 per cent more than his contemporary from