Unless they were working in the City, they could not think of living in the type of homes their parents had brought them up in, or sending their children to the type of schools their parents had sent them to. ‘Career choice is now all-important,’ said Cresswell-Turner, who was a writer and had therefore made the wrong one. ‘Go into the City, where they encourage and feed off the very process that is putting such pressure on the rest of us. As my host at an Oxfordshire dinner party said the other day: “A generation ago it didn’t make much difference what one’s chums did, whether they went into the army or the City or publishing or whatever; but now it’s a make-orbreak decision.”’
Couples from the old bourgeoisie worried about how much they needed to earn to become like their parents—an ambition which would have appalled them when they were teenagers but was now looking more desirable by the day. What was the cost of a house in a sought-after area, a manageable mortgage, regular foreign holidays and places in smart schools for their children? The breathtaking annual income of at least £250,000, and preferably £500,000, the Sunday Times told them in early 2007. If they wanted to be truly rich and afford the central London town house with Britart bric-a-brac on the walls, holiday homes in exotic resorts, access to a private jet and accounts at the chi-chi stores, they would need to make at least £2.5 million—preferably £10 million. Rachel Johnson, who reported the findings, wasn’t exactly a poor little match girl, she was the sister of Boris Johnson, who became the first Tory mayor of London in 2008, but she concluded:
When I look around my normal, as in non-City, contemporaries they are all working their socks off, hamster-wheeling, both the husband and the wife (only one in 10 women of working age can now afford the luxury of staying home unwaged to raise her children). They are raiding their parents’ nest eggs to keep their heads above water, remortgaging their houses to pay the school fees and, if they go abroad at all, they head off to eco-turismo communities in Sicily where several families share a swimming pool (if there is one) and all eat pasta together. As the super-rich are getting richer all the time, they are driving up the prices of the things that we middle classes used to be able to afford on one income, but now can’t manage with two.
In a wicked world full of suffering, the complaints of the shabby genteel were not pressing concerns for busy people with limited supplies of compassion. Nevertheless, I thought them worth listening to because I have found that spectators on the edges provide the best descriptions. They have the access to a privileged milieu, and can see what outsiders cannot; but unlike the truly privileged, who socialise only with fellow insiders, they are not lulled by routine into thinking that the freakish is normal. In the case of the bubble world of 2007, the dazzled and envious commentaries of those on its margins also performed the essential public service of blowing away consoling illusions.
THE GREATEST PROPAGANDA success of its rich men was to convince the rest of society that they were not plutocrats but ‘middle class’. Indeed, not only were the rich meant to be middle class, so was everyone else. The working class, once the object of implausible hopes on the left and unreasonable fears on the right, and the upper class, once the object of surly contempt on the left and abject deference on the right, disappeared from the national conversation. ‘We’re all middle class now,’ declared the media, and hardly anyone noticed that it was talking twaddle.
The proletarianisation of manners explains why. The old ruling class was almost a caste. It had separate schools, separate tastes, separate newspapers and, occasionally, separate countries when its members were sent to govern the Empire. When the Empire fell, so did its legitimacy. The last upper-class prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Educated at Eton, he was the only British prime minister ever to play first-class cricket. He ruled briefly from 1963 to 1964, before being shoved aside by Harold Wilson, a new man, who had not been born into privilege, and promised to forge a meritocratic Britain in the ‘white heat’ of technological revolution. The Tory Party responded by promoting meritocrats of its own. Margaret Thatcher, a provincial grocer’s daughter, so preferred clever Jews to the landed gentry that traditional Conservatives moaned that she had ‘more Estonians than Etonians’ in her cabinet. When her colleagues deposed her in 1990, they decided that Douglas Hurd’s Eton education made him too aristocratic to be her successor, and elected John Major, the son of a former trapeze artiste. Educated at Rutlish Grammar School, he was the only British prime minister ever to run away from the circus to become a politician.
The producers of popular culture confined aristocrats to the society pages or pilloried them as embodiments of all that was devious and dangerous. In a time of multiculturalism, they supplied the solitary stock character Hollywood felt it could denigrate safely. The Germans were long gone and the Soviet empire had fallen. The West was under attack from radical Islamists, but writers and directors worried that it was ‘Islamophobic’ to be beastly about them. The English upper class filled the gap in the market. You only had to hear a cut-glass accent in a Hollywood film or British television thriller to know it belonged to the villain.
The new rich never aroused the same class hatred as their predecessors because they lacked caste distinctions and seemed more at ease with the modern world. The bombastic figure of Philip Green, the shopping tycoon, exemplified their ordinariness. His fortune was beyond the imagination of most—in 2005, he paid himself a dividend of £1.17 billion, the largest payout to an individual in British corporate history. As impossible for the masses to emulate was his ability to avoid paying the same taxes as the little people who shopped or worked in his stores by ferreting away much of his wealth in the Monaco tax haven. But his tastes, like those of most of the rest of the new elite, were those of the common man. For his son’s bar mitzvah in 2005, he spent £4 million on a three-day party for his guests and hired Destiny’s Child to serenade them. A few years before, for his fiftieth birthday, Sir Philip had hired Tom Jones and Rod Stewart to perform at another three-day party, a toga one this time. On his fifty-fifth in 2007, George Michael and Jennifer Lopez did the honours. Given the same resources, the overwhelming majority of his compatriots would have paid to have Stewart, Jones and Michael croon for them if they were old, or to have Lopez and Destiny’s Child impress their friends if they were young. Culturally, the rich were no longer different from you and me. With the exception of the intelligentsia, ‘we’ could all seem the same.
To pretend, however, that ‘we were all middle class’ was wishful thinking when anyone who looked at Britain could see that ‘we’ were more segregated than at any time since the early twentieth century. At the bottom were the poor. Journalists and economists put much effort into maintaining that poverty no longer existed in Britain. The argument’s propaganda value lay in its ability to persuade the wealthy that they need not allow twinges of guilt to spoil the enjoyment of their riches—a remote possibility, I grant you, but one which free-market enthusiasts felt the need to warn against.
But although widespread hunger had been unknown since the thirties, the bottom 25 per cent of households, who could not afford to save £10 a month or pay for an annual holiday, were hard up. Those at the very bottom of the heap, living on an income of £8,600 or less, and unable to afford even £3 for a school trip without cutting back on food or heating, were poor by the standards of the rest of society.
The poor appear in these pages cooking the dinners and looking after the children of the wealthy, or cleaning up after the bankers and journalists of Canary Wharf. Inevitably, their role in the crash was to be its victims when their jobs went—assuming they had jobs, that is: the government was content to leave many vegetating on unemployment or incapacity benefit.
On the next rung up was the 50 per cent of the population which Danny Dorling, a cartographer of the English class system at Sheffield University, described as the ‘normal’ British. They had single incomes of £13,400 to £29,600 and joint incomes if they were in couples generally running into the forty thousands. They could afford school