and Sam Friedman
Many of the members of the British elite interviewed by Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves for their superb new book on the subject stiffly refuse to accept that they belong to any such thing. “I’m just a chap sitting in a little house in a suburb whose life is … normal,” one powerful businessman protests. “Complete rubbish,” scoffs Henry, a senior commercial lawyer. “I have never considered myself to be one of the elite.”
The authors gloss this statement with the illuminating information that Henry is an alumnus of a prestigious boarding school, counts “a former chancellor of the exchequer and several members of the royal family” among his network of acquaintances and has a net worth of more than ten million pounds. He received the authors in the drawing room of his “seven-bedroom Bloomsbury townhouse,” sitting in front of an enormous portrait of himself.
In modern Britain the elite is always someone else. There are many right-wing businessmen who sincerely believe that they are wiggling helplessly under the jackboot of a “radical woke elite.” Left-wing intellectuals who have trailed gilded paths through private school and Oxbridge write jeremiads against “the establishment” as if they have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
The fashion for prolier-than-thou posturing makes Britain’s complex and opaque class system more difficult to interpret than ever. I still find myself naïvely astonished by the periodic discovery that an acquaintance in journalism with a plausible regional accent and beaten-up trainers grew up in a lavishly acred manor house and went to boarding school. Thank God for Friedman and Reeves, sociologists at the LSE and Oxford University respectively, who run a superbly dispassionate scalpel through Britain’s upper crust to expose the cultural interests, political views and social origins of the 21st-century elite.
Their most interesting theme is the reversal of traditional British class snobbery. Not long ago, Britain’s aspirational middle classes used to emphasize their social superiority by concocting spurious baronial forebears and consulting etiquette books that taught them how to lay their dinner tables like dukes. Now they pretend to have humble beginnings. “Nearly half of British people employed in solidly middle-class professional and managerial jobs see themselves as working class,” Friedman and Reeves report. “More strikingly, 24 percent of those in these middle-class jobs who also come from middle-class backgrounds still identify as working class.”
The fashion for prolier-than-thou posturing makes Britain’s complex and opaque class system more difficult to interpret than ever.
Friedman and Reeves tell a compelling story of cultural change. By analyzing the “recreations” cited in Who’s Who they identify three phases of elite culture over the last hundred years or so. In the late 19th century, the people listed in that annual reference book tended to mention traditionally aristocratic “recreations” like shooting, fishing, yachting and the unappealing-sounding “horse-related activities.” These activities signaled status in a straightforward way: they are prohibitively expensive. The lower middle classes do not go in for “horse-related activities” because they can’t afford them.
The next phase Friedman and Reeves identify is “the rise of highbrow culture” in the early 20th century. In their ruthless (and perhaps rather bluntly materialist) analysis, culture changed as self-made industrialists began to buy their way into high society at a time when the wealth of the traditional landed aristocracy suffered “a profound economic decline” thanks to “rising labor costs” and “falling agricultural prices.”
Unable to distinguish themselves through a clear wealth advantage, elites began trying to differentiate themselves from new money through their cultural superiority. Entrants in Who’s Who who came of age in the early 20th century tend to produce gorgeously pretentious lists of intellectual and esoteric recreations. One typical member of this cohort mentions “Chinese ceramics, music, poetry, art, wine, the championing of unjustly neglected writers.” Another boasts of a passion for “travel to archaeological sites and art centers, classical music, food and wine.”
“Nearly half of British people employed in solidly middle-class professional and managerial jobs see themselves as working class.”
The most interesting shift came in the mid-1950s, when the wealthy and influential began to flaunt self-consciously egalitarian and down-to-earth tastes. Typical modern recreations listed in Who’s Who include, “Family and friends, walking, spa days,” “Cookery, family, pets,” “Playing and watching sport, cinema, family, friends, local community.” A few mention “drinking beer.”
The modern elite, Friedman and Reeves write, is “keen to position itself as regular, ordinary and meritocratic … often doing so by positioning itself against a caricatured image of an older elite.” Many of the powerful people they interview believe they can’t possibly be elites because they are not wearing tweed and puffing cigars in a Pall Mall club.
What explains the downwardly aspirational drift of the 21st-century elite? An important factor is probably the rise of meritocracy after the Second World War. Although Friedman and Reeves point out that the idea of a modern meritocratic elite is something of a myth (family connections and a private education are still useful for getting into the establishment), meritocracy is still a powerful idea.
In 21st-century society, status accrues not to those who were born into the top social caste, but to those who worked hard for their success. Our ancestors scorned arrivistes; we prefer those from ordinary backgrounds who have attained their exalted social positions through hard work. When you embrace pastimes like “beer” and “football” you are signaling (truthfully or otherwise) that you have come from an ordinary background and therefore deserve your success.
Another factor is the enormous increase in the wealth of the top 1 percent relative to the rest of society since the 1980s. “As elites have pulled away economically, they may have become more insecure about their moral legitimacy and increasingly sensitive to public concern that they are motivated by self-interest.” The more out of touch elites become, the keener they are to signal their proximity to the common man.
Our ancestors scorned arrivistes; we prefer those from ordinary backgrounds who have attained their exalted social positions through hard work.
Friedman and Reeves are also interesting on the ways the politics of the elite differ from those of the general population. The notion of a “woke elite” is not wholly a fantasy dreamed up by the Daily Telegraph’s op-ed desk. Although the majority of British elites espouse centrist opinions that Reeves and Friedman call “New Labour left”, a growing minority of the ruling class hold views they call “progressive left”. Such people “represent an outright majority in … religion and the media, with another smaller sector, the creative industries, following a bit further behind”. Interestingly, “among those born after 1959, the progressive left are marginally the biggest grouping within the British elite”.
One idea Friedman and Reeves don’t discuss is the possibility that young members of the elite espouse progressive views on social issues for the same reason they now wear Reebok classics and not brogues — as a way of seeming down with the people and to differentiate themselves from the caricature of the stuffy old establishment with its inherited wealth and alarming views on empire.
One curious side-effect of Born to Rule is to make the reader nostalgic for the unabashed snobs of the old school. There is a bracing straightforwardness to the blue-blooded old buffers who pop up with gobbets of disarming honesty in between the reams of pseudo-proletarian fakery. “We all assumed that if we wanted to, we’d go to Oxford or Cambridge,” a corporate lawyer named Hugh reminisces. “In those days there weren’t many other universities, well not ones that counted …” Michael, an academic and politician, recalls unabashedly that when growing up, “I felt very superior … my grandmother was a great antiques collector and had beautiful paintings and so on and had this amazing huge Georgian Regency house.”
Such people are quite happy to admit that they owe their careers to the nepotistic intervention of kindly relatives (“I was up at Cambridge and I began to think then, what am I going to do? And I got a very clear message from my uncle, he said, ‘I can introduce you to … one of the two senior partners at Simmons & Simmons”). For all their airy cluelessness about ordinary life, this kind of privilege is more bearable than the gruesome note of unjustified self-pity that tends to creep into the modern elite’s account of its success. “Because my father was a judge,” one explains, “I never thought of myself as coming from a sort of upper-class background.” After all, he continues, “none of my friends at Rugby were hunting, shooting, fishing types.”
Another remembers being mocked at Eton because his father didn’t have a car. Someone else worried that his father was “the poorest parent at St Paul’s.” Cry me a river. Infuriatingly, such people tend to attribute their success not to wealth, but to a willingness to take “risks” and be “disruptive.” One interviewee proudly cites his “innovative” and “unorthodox” approach to corporate law. Friedman and Reeves sagely point out that it is much easier to disrupt and take risks when you are cushioned by the Bank of Mum and Dad. Theirs is a book rich in insight, data and original thought. Connoisseurs of hypocrisy and self-delusion will find much to savor too.
James Marriott is a columnist at The Times of London, covering society, ideas, and culture
