DEMOCRACY NEEDS

ARISTOCRACY

PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

HARPER PERENNIAL London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Not only does every country have the aristocracy it deserves, but so does every era, including the democratic era. In this essay the term is used in two senses: first, to describe families whose power and authority, high prestige and assured dignity, depended upon titles of nobility dating back, in some cases, to feudal times; and, second, to describe families whose power and authority depend not so much on the distinction of ancient lineage as on what the distinguished American historian John Lukacs* calls ‘distinctions derived from the consanguinity of their families with high civic reputation’; in other words, on a record of public service rather than on blood. Of the first it could be said that they were powerful and authoritative because they were noble; of the second that they were noble because they were powerful and influential.

Mr Lukacs suggests that a better term to describe this second meaning – families who are noble because they are powerful and influential, rather than the other way around – would be ‘patrician’ rather than aristocratic. They have something in common he writes, ‘with the old patrician societies of modern Europe, nearer to the middle of the continent, with a social and civic order incarnated by the great merchant families in cities such as Basel, Geneva, Amsterdam, Hamburg, or with the grand bourgeois (often Protestant) families in France … little in common with Proust’s world of the Guermantes; many things in common with the world of Buddenbrooks (which Thomas Mann described in 1901) … solidly bourgeois (in the best sense of that often used word) and not glitteringly feudal.’ Mr Lukacs’s point is well taken. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the description ‘patrician’ catches the flavour of the English ruling class rather better than the word ‘aristocratic’, covering, as it does, both Peel and Salisbury, Disraeli and Gladstone, Harold Macmillan and Hugh Gaitskell, even, just, both Tony Blair and Michael Howard. Nevertheless, out of habit, I have decided to stick to aristocratic and aristocracy and to leave it to the reader to make the necessary adjustment according to the context.

In any case, central to both meanings is the idea of certain families, joined together by the invisible bonds of memory, as bearers of important moral and social values and political traditions that carry authority because they have been demonstrated, to the satisfaction of all classes, to have served the public interest over many generations.

An aristocracy must also have another intangible source of power and authority – transcending all the others – that comes from longevity; from having been around long enough to have become an integral part of the nation’s history and mythology. So without that time-honoured place in a nation’s history and mythology an aristocracy ceases to be an aristocracy, and reverts back to being an ordinary power elite, whether in the form of plutocracy, oligarchy, a military junta, or meritocracy. In other words, the authority of an aristocracy, like that of a theocracy, depends on the power of faith: the public’s faith in it and the aristocracy’s faith in itself. It profits an aristocracy little, therefore, to retain only its wealth and power because without that intangible element of faith – beyond the range of political scientists to identify or quantify – it is no more than sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

In this essay I shall try to argue that because of the British aristocracy’s uniquely successful past, residual elements of the old faith still survive, along with even larger elements of its old wealth and influence. Legal status is also a factor. At the time of writing, the aristocracy still has legal status. Titles are officially bestowed and recognized, and a certain number of hereditary peers are still allowed to take a seat in the House of Lords, albeit only if elected by their fellow peers. But legal status could be more of a liability than an asset because, as John Stuart Mill famously remarked, ‘the best way to discredit an idea is to give it a privileged, legal status’.

Unquestionably this causes resentment, and in some ways, therefore, the French, who got rid of the privileged status of their aristocracy in the eighteenth century by cutting off their heads, and the Americans, who never had such an aristocracy in the first place, are now less upset by the idea of aristocracy than the British. So much is readily admitted in this essay. In today’s climate a de jure privileged aristocracy with titles of nobility and places in parliament may be an enemy of de facto hereditary aristocracy, which merges so imperceptibly into the ranks of meritocracy as not to present any visible target on which doctrinal egalitarians can train their guns. So it could well be that the idea of aristocracy in Britain would be strengthened rather than weakened by the removal of their legal privileges.

In any case, as this essay also tries to show, the role of the hereditary aristocracy in British history was so massive and splendid that it cannot – much as it might like to – just fold up its tents and fade away. The public and media won’t let it. It is still too much part of ‘us’; too deeply embedded in the nation’s literature and culture; indeed in the national consciousness itself. What is more, its code of gentlemanly behaviour, which was eventually adopted by substantial elements in all classes, came to enjoy the status of a sub-Christian cult, exercising on many (for whom the demands of Christianity were too arduous) a more direct influence for good than did Christianity proper. So although in theory it might be wonderful to replace aristocratic deference with civic republicanism, that is most unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. What is much more likely to happen – indeed is already happening – is the replacement of aristocratic deference, not by civic republican pride, but by something much more like egalitarian hypocrisy at the top and proletarian rancour at the bottom.

Plainly, therefore, some opening of minds is needed. Reactionary supporters of the class system, if there are any left, must understand how offensive it is to contemporary public opinion for the State to reserve positions of power and influence at the top of society – in the House of Lords, for example – for men and women whose individual talents would not otherwise justify them holding these positions. Most anti-egalitarians, I would imagine, have now conceded this point. But most egalitarians, unfortunately, are still as far as ever from opening their minds to the no less important truth that for the power of the State to be used to create a wholly classless society is equally objectionable. By a classless society* they presumably mean one in which those running things in the present have no association with those who ran them in the past; in which those running things are all drawn from families who have not themselves been running things; a society, that is, in which the only social distinction officially approved of is the one separating the minority that is running things (i.e. the elites) from the majority who are not running things (i.e. the masses). While such a society would certainly do away with individuals enjoying positions at the top of society to which their inherent talents do not qualify them – a marginally desirable development – it would also mean that the social space at the top occupied by those who deserved to be at the top would be demoralizingly barren and thin – a fundamentally undesirable development. A state-sponsored classless society would be an atomized society. It doesn’t bear thinking about. In other words, there ought always to be a social space at the top of society in which vestiges of the past (elites emeritus, so to speak) remain. Otherwise life at the top will be horribly nasty, brutish, and short, with grim consequences for life at every other social level.

In the past the State has smiled on aristocracy, and in this essay I lovingly adumbrate the benefits this country over the centuries has garnered from an aristocracy so favoured. But I also recognize that smiling on aristocracy, in the present climate, is no longer acceptable. To that degree, egalitarianism must rule. But only to that degree. What must not happen is that the smile should be replaced by a frown; that legal discrimination in favour should be replaced by legal discrimination against. In short, what this essay seeks to help create is a state of public opinion in which the old upper classes and their institutions, shorn of their legal privileges, are once again seen as a source of strength rather than weakness; a blessing rather than a curse; and above all, as ideally suited – rather than exceptionally unsuited – for public service.*

So this essay is not just a lament for the passing away of aristocracy; it is quite as much a plea for it to be given a new and constructive lease of life. For the only way to supersede an aristocracy that has done such historic service as Britain’s has is to incorporate it. Only by continuing to use it, can we go beyond it.*

One

Others ascribe to me alternately democratic or aristocratic prejudices; perhaps I might have had one or the other if I had been born in another century and in another country. But as it happened, my birth made it very easy for me to guard against both. I came into the world at the end of a long revolution which, after having destroyed the old order, created nothing that could last. When I began my life, aristocracy was already dead, and democracy was still unborn. Therefore, my instincts could not lead me blindly towards one or the other. I have lived in a country which for forty years has tried a little of everything and settled nothing definitively. It was not easy for me, therefore, to have any political illusions … I had no natural hatred or jealousy of the aristocracy and, since that aristocracy had been destroyed, I had no natural affection for it, for one can only be strongly attached to the living. I was near enough to know it intimately, and far enough to judge it dispassionately. I may say as much for the democratic elements…. In a word, I was so nicely balanced between the past and the future that I did not feel instinctively drawn toward the one or the other. It required no great effort to contemplate quietly both sides.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The spark that fired me into writing this essay on the importance of the class system to English democracy was the following paragraph in Richard Hoggart’s final volume of memoirs, First and Last Things.

Democracy is never an abstraction. It has to be rooted in a sense of our own particular culture, of its virtues, strengths, limitations … It arises from the people we have known, loved, respected as we grew up, whether that was among the urban or rural working class, or the conscientious and public-spirited among the middle class, or the upper class.

‘Or the upper class’. Those were the four words that did the trick. For although I knew Mr Hoggart to be a most fair-minded man, I could not stifle the suspicion that he had added them only in a spirit of giving the devil his due – rather as a child feels obliged to add the name of some much disliked gorgon of an aunt to its bedtime supplications. Could he sincerely have believed, I asked myself, that a member of the British upper class had anything useful to contribute on the subject of British democracy except in an apologetic, exculpatory, or at best nostalgic mode? And if Mr Hoggart did so believe, surely he should at least have warned such a person to keep quiet about his own aristocratic provenance, lest readers should dismiss his views as likely to be self-serving and anachronistic, harking back to the ‘good old days’ when everybody knew where they stood but only a privileged few, like himself, enjoyed being there?

But then I had second thoughts. Why on earth should not a member – which I myself in part am – of the very class that, in 1688, created England’s particular kind of democracy, and presided over its glorious destiny for over three hundred years, have something useful to say about its future? True, such a person, with roots in the upper-class culture, would be less qualified than Mr Hoggart, with his roots in the working class, to write about the ‘virtues, strength, limitations’ of English democracy from the bottom-dog perspective of the ruled; but did not that suggest, by the same token, that he would be more qualified to write about them from the equally if not more important top-dog perspective of the rulers?

Democratic top dogs? Is that not a contradiction in terms? Most emphatically not, since this is precisely what English aristocrats were: an organic part of England’s democratic body politic, no more or less an organic part of that body than were the bottom dogs. Was not Winston Churchill, grandson of a Duke, but elected by the people, also, in the English sense, a democrat – someone, like Brutus, prepared to take up arms against tyranny? In England love of freedom, not a lack of quarterings, was and is the true test. Trying to write the aristocratic dimension out of English democracy, therefore, is like trying to write the Prince of Denmark out of Hamlet.

In my youth, of course, they tended to try to do the opposite: to write the working class out of the story. England’s democracy seemed then to consist exclusively of grandees, most with titles. It was a view of democracy from the top downwards. Now, however, the fashionable view is increasingly from the bottom upwards. Thus the success or failure of England’s democracy, which in the old days was largely measured by the statesmanship of its leaders and the standing of the country, is now largely measured by the quality of the man in the street.

In this essay, mindful of Mao’s dictum about the fish rotting from the head downwards, I try to redress the balance, not, I hasten to say, so as to advocate reinstating the upper class – or anything as absurdly reactionary as that – but so as to highlight the gaping hole left in the head of our body politic by its extinction; its extinction, moreover, without any serious thought having been given to how, and with whom, that great empty hole should be filled. From time to time newspaper commentators amuse us by pretending that ‘Tony’s cronies’ have filled the hole. That only shows how little the role of the old ruling class, in the sense that it is used in this essay, is understood.

The difficulty here, I believe, is that ever since the problems created by the Industrial Revolution, political and social thinkers in Britain, as in the rest of the world, have been concerned exclusively with the condition of the tail – the poor and the underprivileged. And quite rightly so since, thanks to the Victorian reforms of the public schools, of Oxbridge, and of the Civil Service, the elites, by the end of the nineteenth century, were in pretty good shape. What so much more obviously and urgently needed attention was the quality of life, moral and material, not of the few but of the many.

Roughly speaking, that still remains the state of play today. While there have been endless studies of the demoralizing effects of inner-city living conditions, or of capitalism generally, on the poor and underprivileged, there have been none, so far as I know, of the demoralizing effects of gross suburban affluence in such towns as Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross – where there is a Mercedes and/or a BMW in every garage – and of capitalism generally on the rich and overprivileged.* No, I am not being facetious. Plato has a lot to say about the ideal conditions for nurturing elites, or what he called ‘guardians’. So, of course, famously, did Edmund Burke.

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect oneself; to be habituated to censorial inspection of the public eye … to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw on the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found … these are the circumstances of men that form what I call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Nor does one need to go back to the eighteenth century or to classical Athens for such comments. For the great twentieth-century thinker and economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his famous Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943), has this to say:

There are many ways in which politicians of a sufficiently good quality can be secured. Thus far, however, experience seems to suggest that the only effective guarantee is in the existence of a social stratum itself a product of a severely selective process, that takes to politics as a matter of course. If such a stratum be neither too exclusive nor too accessible for the outsider and if it be strong enough to assimilate most of the elements it currently absorbs, it not only will present for the political career products of stocks that have successfully passed many tests in other fields – served, as it were, an apprenticeship in private affairs – but it will also increase their fitness by endowing them with traditions that embody experience, with a professional code and with a common fond of views.

Schumpeter’s words ‘Thus Far’ were written during the war, but as far as I know there has been no evidence since then to suggest that we have found any better ways. Quite the opposite, judging by the quality of today’s leaders. But when did you last hear a contemporary politician – even a Tory one – admit as much? Nor is this in the least surprising, since to do so would be committing political suicide.

While in the old days socialists argued, very reasonably, that it was the duty of the State to improve the conditions of the lower classes, and Old Tories argued, also very reasonably, that it was their party’s duty to maintain the privileges of the upper classes (and the liberals made a powerful case for not feather-bedding either the Duke or the dustman), today all the parties agree, or pretend to agree, that it is the job of the State to do away with class altogether, quite regardless of the fact that our political institutions (c.f. Mao’s head) grew out of that class system and have depended on it ever since for their health and strength.

But having been brought up among the upper class myself, perhaps it is only natural for me to be aware of that class’s strengths and virtues rather than its limitations. I don’t think so. For as it happens, fate dealt me a very mixed hand of class cards, which I like to think has made it easier for me than for others to achieve a degree of objectivity. But in case that is wishful thinking on my part, it is probably wisest to take the opportunity at the outset to lay my class cards face up on the table, so that readers of the essay can swallow it with as large or as little a pinch of salt as they deem desirable or necessary.

My grandfather, Alexander Koch de Gooreynd, came from Belgian banking stock, his father having emigrated here at the end of the nineteenth century. Having arrived, he bought a house in Belgrave Square and then built his wife another and tried – only being just nipped in the bud by the Astor family – to buy The Times from Lord North-cliffe. After Sending my father to Eton and into the Irish Guards, my grandfather then put the final touches to my father’s rites of passage into the upper class by arranging for him to marry my mother, granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon – a Catholic family connected by marriage to the Duke of Norfolk, secular head of the Catholic establishment. The marriage, however, did not work since the couple were incompatible, my father wanting to lead the life of the idle rich and my mother, much the stronger character, determined to shoehorn him into English public life. The poor man was found a parliamentary constituency by our uncle Edmund Fitzalan, (younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk), the Tory Chief Whip at the time, and did his best – changing his name to Worsthorne* for the purpose – but it didn’t work. And after several unsuccessful attempts, he gave up the struggle and the name. My mother, who despised the idle rich, never forgave him and they soon separated.

From then on, so terrified was my mother that my brother and I might follow in our father’s self-indulgent footsteps that during our childhood we were scarcely ever allowed to see him. I remember being taken out from school in his yellow Rolls Royce,† equipped ahead of the times with a cocktail bar, at the most twice, and that, alas, was the total extent, until we came of age, of our contact. Not so much a role model, therefore, as an anti-role model. We were brought up to be as unlike our father as possible, even to the point of not being sent to Eton and not being allowed to join the Irish Guards.

Then, in the 1930s, our mother got her heart’s desire. She married the man of her dreams, Montagu Norman, then the great interwar Governor of the Bank of England, as dedicated to public service as our father was to private pleasure. Norman, unlike our father, was Protestant, which meant divorce and remarriage in a registry office, both repugnant to our recusant Catholic relations, from whose presence my mother – to her great relief – and her children were summarily banished for life: for my brother and I, this meant, in turn, no more Christmases and holidays with Uncle Edmund at Cumberland Lodge, his grace-and-favour home in Windsor Park – where guests included George V and Queen Mary, as well as the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin – or at Arundel Castle; and no more eavesdropping as our elders and betters discussed ad nauseam the Conversion of England, the future of the Catholic schools, and other such burning public issues of the day. But instead, being thenceforward under Montagu Norman’s roof, we soon became equally accustomed to hear talk about more secular public issues – the Gold Standard, unemployment, etc., with visitors like Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic guru, Sir John Reith, the first Director General of the BBC, and Maynard Keynes. So from a very early age, res publica, ‘the public thing’, was part of our lives.

I can remember quite clearly when I was made aware that it was not part of everybody else’s life. The parents of a fellow pupil at my prep school had taken me out and in the course of the outing my friend’s father, who was in the rag trade, had waxed indignant about a Neville Chamberlain Budget. Always anxious to find some precociously grownup subject to write about to my mother in my weekly letter home, I passed on this conversation, mentioning in particular the father’s objection to a tax rise that would hit the retail trade particularly hard, only to receive a long handwritten letter – the first and the last – from the Governor himself. Sadly, I haven’t kept the text, but its gist left a lasting mark. The Chancellor’s job, he emphasized, was not to please the rag trade, or any other private interest, but rather to take care of the nation’s solvency. A good Budget was almost by definition an unpopular Budget. He went on to cite his friend Walter Lippmann’s view that it was a government’s job to tax, conscript, command and prohibit, punish, and balance the budget, none of which responsibilities could usually be safely fulfilled without offending many individual members of the public. Inevitably, the conflict between the public interest and the private interest was most acute in time of war, when the balance had to be got right between the public interest in victory and the private interest of millions of mothers and fathers that their boys should return home alive; but in peacetime, too, there could be almost equally agonizing conflicts and he instanced his own recent duty at the Bank of England to take actions in the national interest that had inflicted cruel suffering on the unemployed.

Very recently, in Louis Menand’s excellent book The Metaphysical Club – mostly about late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American philosophers – I came across a ruling of the famous American Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was also one of my stepfather’s correspondents, and its chilling note had such a familiar ring that I am sure it was also included in that letter. Certainly it is in its spirit and comes in the course of a 1927 opinion by Holmes about a Virginian law permitting the involuntary sterilization of mentally incompetent persons. Menand rightly describes it as Holmes’s most ‘notorious opinion’* and it went as follows:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may well call upon the best citizens for their lives.† It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices.

Whether or not that was the same quotation as the one recommended to me by my stepfather I shall never know; but, if not, it was certainly another equally stupefying.

And then at about the same time, as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, the critic John Davenport – whose war work was to teach English at Stowe for the duration – recommended me to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, wherein I came across a passage that included the following quotation from Boethius:

If any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance, having some such disease, she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive: and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted [my italics].

To which Burton had added:

A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now, by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost, free from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had.

It was a heady brew. Clearly somebody, ‘lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted’, had to do the nation’s dirty work; had to authorize difficult and sometimes cruel actions for the common good; had to be on the side of realism against sentimentality; had to resist giving way not only to every grievance (which was relatively easy) but also to manifestly worthy causes as well; had to rub society’s nose in the painful realities of keeping a great nation on course. No less clearly, careerist politicians – whose careers depended on retaining popular favour – were the last people who could be relied upon to grasp these nettles. So who were these indispensable somebodies who had to bear these public burdens? The inference from my stepfather’s letter was unavoidable: those indispensable somebodies most definitely included me.

I don’t remember being in the least pleased by this realization, still less proud. It seemed, at first, a terrifying prospect. All my schoolboy inclinations at Stowe were inclined towards private pleasures – particularly the pleasure of burying my head in a book – and against team spirit, which was the boarding-school idea of public duty. The last thing I wanted – at any rate in these early years – was to be made a prefect. Neither did I want to forgo the protection that the prefects – or at least the decent ones – provided the weak and cowardly (i.e. me) against the bullies.* So I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office. Those paragons, however, are always very few on the ground and, not being among them, I did eventually accept being made a prefect, because one of that office’s privileges was frequent contact with the great founding headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, who exercised authority with the lightest of reins in the manner of a connoisseur who appreciates quality and style in all its forms, as much in the dilettante aesthete who refuses to play games as in the captain of the school rugger XV who refuses to do anything else. He believed a well-ordered boarding school should not aim to turn out leadership material of a uniform sort but quality material for every different walk of life – quality top dogs and quality bottom dogs, quality politicians and quality voters, and even quality revolutionaries. ‘Don’t talk of a ruling class,’ he would say. ‘Call it a quality class, a class that contributes to the good society just as much by “being” as by “doing”.’

As for how Stowe was different from, say, Eton, I think JF would have replied along the following lines: that whereas Eton had seen its function as that of civilizing primarily the sons of the old ruling class, and only secondarily the sons of the nouveaux riches whose parents wanted their offspring ‘aristocratized’, Stowe saw its function as that of turning out humane and gentrified meritocrats who would not take it for granted, or give the impression that they took it for granted, that they were ‘born to rule’. What JF wanted, in short, was the Etonian spirit in a more egalitarian frame, or, as he put it, ‘Etonians in grey flannels rather than in the archaic white tie and tails’. One was never left in doubt at Stowe that competitive individualism and equality of opportunity were the waves of the future; but neither was one left in doubt that it was the duty of an Old Stoic to ride these waves not just to his own personal advantage, but also to the advantage of the nation as a whole. Oblige, yes: JF tried hard to instil that; but he was rather less emphatic about noblesse. A gentrified or patrician meritocracy, not unlike the Wasp ascendancy on the East Coast of America, was JF’s ideal, which to some extent he achieved in such Old Stoics of my generation as Noel Annan,* Robert Kee, Tony Quinton, and, quintessentially, the figure of Nicko Henderson, the most relaxed, informal, and least stuffy top English Ambassador ever.

Put like that, my stepfather’s idea of public duties seemed to me rather less frighteningly high-powered and much more acceptably low-key, especially after – at the instigation of Stowe’s charismatic history tutor, Bill McElwee – reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s great classic Democracy in America. For Tocqueville gave a commonsensical, un-Hobbesian rationale to the ideal of aristocracy: not so much as a body of superior beings bred to exercise power over the people but as a body of men whose dignified and leisured circumstances made them most likely to exercise power in the public interest, mainly because, in their case, the public interest and the private interest – by reason of the aristocracy’s greater stake in the country – was so nearly indistinguishable. ‘Among aristocratic nations’, Tocqueville wrote,

a man almost always knows his forefathers and respects them; he thinks he already sees his remote descendants and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter, and he will frequently sacrifice his own personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him [my italics].

Tocqueville’s was a down-to-earth utilitarian justification for aristocracy – ‘that it worked’. In France, where aristocracy had been degraded by the French monarchy, aristocracy led to revolution; in England, where the aristocracy had degraded the monarchy, aristocracy led to order and justice. The English aristocracy, he wrote, ‘is perhaps the most liberal that ever existed and no body of men has ever uninterruptedly furnished so many honourable and enlightened individuals for the government of a country’.

In the light of what we now think we know about the lamentable state of the English ruling class in the 1920s and 1930s, Tocqueville’s idealistic assumption about its merits may indeed seem quite ludicrously out of date. Certainly today’s conventional wisdom has it that the golden chivalry of England was all mown down while leading their men into battle in the Great War, leaving only the dross behind. Nobody who has read the socialite Chips Channon’s interwar diaries, which give a picture of hedonistic irresponsibility and self-indulgence in high places of almost Nerolike proportions, would be inclined to doubt this; and Evelyn Waugh’s famous interwar novel Vile Bodies confirms that impression. So does Edward VIII’s pathetic abdication, usually portrayed as the prime example of that age’s spirit of irresponsible hedonism. In my recollection, however, that decadent impression is profoundly misleading. For surely, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognize that the truly remarkable aspect of the abdication was not the King’s irresponsible hedonism but the Establishment’s revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne – against his irresponsible hedonism. Both my old Catholic family and my new Norman family circles played prominent parts in this reaction. It was my uncle Edmund Fitzalan, for example, who helped persuade Stanley Baldwin that the King would have to abdicate and my stepfather Montagu Norman who exercised the same kind of pressure – not that he actually needed much pressure – on Neville Chamberlain. If one wants an example of how a well-functioning Establishment can serve the public interest, the despatch of Edward VIII provides it in spades. But that is only one small illustration of how, in my recollection, the achievements of the governing class in the 1920s and 1930s, at any rate on the home front, have not yet received their fair share of acclamation.

It was an intensely difficult period. In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, the raw passions of democracy, inflamed both by totalitarian temptations from the far Left as from the far Right, were threatening to burn the house down. If Britain’s parliamentary democracy was to have a chance of surviving, it had to come up with an alternative that could also catch the public’s imagination. That is what the great conservative leader and Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, succeeded in doing long before Roosevelt did something of the same order with his New Deal in the United States. In a whole series of speeches of incomparable eloquence, both inside and outside Parliament, Baldwin sought to link patriotic pride to the uniquely English set of gentlemanly rules and conduct towards others.* He appealed to the best of the working class and the best of the industrialists to prove to the world that in the self-sacrificial, altruistic ideal of the English gentleman, unique to this country, lay the only safe way forward. As a result of English history, he argued, a unique system of mutual obligations and duties had been evolved that could and must be called upon to help the country escape the looming horrors of class war. Let the best among the working-class leaders and among the industrialists defy Marx by showing that in England both were capable, like true aristocrats, of behaving nobly, not so as to facilitate the dominion of one particular class but in the interest of serving the country as a whole. Baldwin’s constant evocation of England’s rural arcadia was not due to any sentimentally nostalgic desire to put the industrial clock back. How could it be, given his own ironmaster’s background? No, it was due to his belief that in the pre-industrial centuries some unique quality of trust had been engendered that could once again be enlisted to see the nation through difficult and dangerous times. Class war, socialism, fascism were un-English ideas, only suitable, if suitable at all, for foreign countries unlucky enough not to have developed the English gentlemanly habits of conciliation and compromise that would see us through the problems of the twentieth century, just as they had seen us through the problems of previous centuries. Greedy acquisitiveness was the enemy wherever it reared its ugly head, particularly, of course, among the rich. Baldwin abhorred ‘the hard faced millionaires who had done well out of the war’. In fact it was he who coined the phrase, not Keynes, and he hated ostentatious displays of wealth. The word ‘service’ was central to his discourse, especially the service owed by the rich, the privileged, and the well educated, who were repeatedly adjured to put human rights before the rights of property. Britain was, in one of his phrases, ‘a noble democracy’. Even if industrialists and trade union leaders everywhere else knew only how to behave like ‘robber barons’, in Britain at least they could be relied upon to behave like Christian gentlemen. That was the ideal he preached and, in his courteous treatment of Labour Party leaders and trade union leaders, also practised, according them a public respect he went out of his way not to accord to many of the industrialists.

Montagu Norman agreed with every word. He, too, believed that the wealthy classes should place love of country before money; that wealth involved stewardship; that industrial employers should aim to act as trustees for the whole community; and, above all, that employees were only as good as their employers. He, too, deplored managers and directors who were interested primarily in their salaries and fees – people we now call fat cats – and refused to have them at his table, believing that flaunting vulgar ostentation offered revolutionaries their best justification.*

Like most public-school boys of the period, at any rate those at the public schools, I was deeply affected by Baldwin’s great speeches, one of which I was taken to hear in a packed and enthusiastic Albert Hall. Collections of his speeches were presented as school prizes and bishops used quotations from them as a text for their sermons. His main theme was very simple: that instead of looking abroad for grand new ideologies to solve the problems of the twentieth century, all classes should instead buckle down, in the time-honoured way, to do their duty, which, of course, is what, when the war came, most of them did. So whatever can be said by way of criticism of Baldwin for not attending to the country’s material rearmament, nobody can justly deny him the credit for carrying out an exercise in moral rearmament quite unparalleled in the nation’s history.

W. H. Auden’s jibe about the 1930s being a ‘low dishonest decade’, therefore, does not at all accord with my own recollection. I remember it as a decade when the concept of duty* was stretched to cover pretty well everything; when selfishness was regarded as the mark of the beast, the root of all moral failure; when altruism was held to be the root of all virtue; and when, under Baldwin’s spell, those aspiring to govern were adjured to dedicate themselves, if not to the service of God, then with all the more fervour to the service of their fellow men. Rereading these speeches today – dismissed at the time by intellectuals of the Right and the Left as impractical and unrealistic – I have to say that they seem to have stood the test of time far better than the writings of those same intellectuals, which now read like the ravings of madmen. In any case, if the 1930s really were such a ‘low and dishonest decade’, one question has to be asked. How did it come to pass that of all the countries that lived through those years, Britain, alone among the great European powers, escaped relatively unscathed from the corrosions of fascism and communism and went into the war against Hitler so relatively united and with such relatively high national morale? While Churchill’s courageous oratory was certainly part of the answer, the Baldwin balm was also a blessing beyond price.

The support of the ruling classes for the Chamberlain policy of appeasement is much more difficult to cast in a good light. But here again, from my particular viewpoint, it did not strike me then, and it does not strike me now, as in the least ‘low’ or ‘dishonest’ in the ordinary sense of those words. My stepfather, who had a won a DSO in the Boer War, stood foursquare behind Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, not out of weak unwillingness to face up to the reality of war – his long talks in Berlin and London with Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic adviser, had dissolved all illusions on that score – but rather out of an equally strong determination to be realistic about the consequences for Britain of going to war with Hitler. His charge against Churchill was that while he was telling the British people the truth about the gravity of the former reality, he was grossly deceiving them about the gravity of the second, which could not fail, he believed, to be the end of Britain as a great and independent power, win or lose the war. Going to war could well be Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, Norman used to say, but for Britain it would be the beginning of the end. Like Robert Fossett, the fictional hero of Christopher Hollis’s book, The Death of a Gentleman – which came out in 1943 – Norman always ‘shuddered at the folly of those who talked as if a war would be merely a matter of beating Hitler, and that then, that evil removed, the world would go on its comfortable way of progress, like a man who has had an aggravating tooth removed at the dentist. Starting a war was much more like starting a glacier. The world was full of disruptive, nihilistic forces, and, once the ice began to move, none could say how far it would travel, nor what at the last would survive its catastrophe.’ In Norman’s view, therefore, the appeasers were not a lot of unpatriotic poltroons, as against the Churchillians who were patriotic statesman willing to grasp nettles. Rather the opposite. It was the appeasers who were grasping the most frightening nettle of all, which was that the only way for Britain to survive as a great power, and the only way for the old conservative Europe to survive, was to avoid a war with Hitler, even if this did involve paying the horribly high price of abandoning Eastern Europe and the Jews to a terrible fate. Of course in the light of Churchill’s victory in 1945, appeasement did come to seem shamefully defeatist. But surely, in the light of what we know of the decline and disintegration of Britain in the last half of the twentieth century, and its likely disappearance to all great effects and noble purposes, except as foot soldiers in an American army, in the first half of the twenty-first century; and in the light, moreover, of what, in spite of Churchill’s war, did happen to the Jews and to the East Europeans, one can now see that the appeasers were not acting out of cowardice but out of a kind of sober courage, by comparison with which Churchill’s eagerness to embrace war begins to seem almost irresponsibly vainglorious.*

Another difficulty for the reputation of the appeasers is that, because they were in power in the 1930s, they are still associated in the public mind with the decadence of high society in that decade. In fact, however, the leading appeasers – Baldwin, Chamberlain, Norman, and others – much less deserved to be tarred with that brush than many of the anti-appeasers, like the financially greedy Churchill, the unashamedly lecherous Duff Cooper, and the almost brazenly dishonest Robert Boothby. The difficulty here is that the true muscle of the 1930s ruling class did not frequent high society, did not go to grand balls or Belgrave Square parties. Hence the erroneous impression that the space at the top of the tree in the 1930s was entirely filled by social butterflies. If Norman had kept a diary, however, it would have given a very different and more impressive picture, as my brother and I have good cause to remember. For his public service standards, and those of his whole world, were Spartan to a fault, or to what my brother and I judged to be a fault. No luxuries were tolerated, and strict economies enforced. So when I became keen on riding at my preparatory school, and wrote asking for riding boots, my mother sent me a pair of her own – far too pointed at the toe for my comfort – with the raised heels sawn off. And such was the importance placed on not disturbing the Governor’s concentration on his public duties that we were kept out of his way during school holidays in a country cottage of our own, with our own butler and cook – more fun in theory than in practice, since our mother, who shared her second husband’s priorities, was seldom present. In fact, domestic felicity and family life seldom got a look-in.

Born into an upper-middle-class banking family of long standing and educated at Eton – which, unlike my father, he hated – and at King’s College Cambridge, Norman dedicated all his waking hours to the City of London, living austerely, almost ascetically, and eschewing wine, women (until he met my mother) and song so as to be able to give his all to his work. He was, at all times, a pillar of rectitude, imposing on the City the highest standards of integrity. The idle-rich, Chips Channon kind of society appalled him and he deplored the loving attention given by the media to this debauched minority, rightly regarding their antics as obscenely objectionable at a time of mass unemployment brought about very largely, of course, by his own tight fiscal policies, harshly imposed, he always believed, in the long term ‘public interest’.

His own life, as I say, was exemplary in this regard. Whereas most bankers went to the City in chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces, he travelled by tube from Notting Hill Gate to the Bank, causing quite a sensation by so doing. Indeed the spectacle of this tall figure with a Charles I beard, season ticket tucked into the ribbon of his silk hat worn at a jaunty angle, descending into the underground at 8.30 a.m. sharp and ascending thirty minutes later at the Bank – where the buses were held up to allow the Governor to cross Threadneedle Street – became almost as much of a tourist attraction as the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace. His hobby was to design and build furniture in the Art Deco style, and although he inherited two country houses, he occupied only a garden cottage in one, where he made a point of coming down to dinner in slippers and bare feet and eating simple fare. When the Second World War came, almost nothing had to change. Even in peacetime, we were already living, by choice, on a war footing.

As for hobbies, his favourite one was snubbing newspaper proprietors because they exaggerated – in search of circulation-building copy – the importance of the decadent elements in high society, thereby irresponsibly dissolving the bonds of mutual sympathy and respect that should naturally exist between rich and poor, governors and governed. He was fond of saying that they had a vested interest in barbarism because civilization did not sell newspapers. Lord Beaverbrook, for example, was never allowed to cross the threshold. Norman’s secretary was instructed to refuse all his importuning. Naturally that was not the picture – as insecure interlopers desperate for recognition – the newspapers chose to give of where their proprietors stood in the social pecking order, but this was how they were looked down on from our particular pinnacle. When Lord and Lady Kemsley, then the owners of the Sunday Times, wrote to say that they were looking forward to being fellow passengers on a transatlantic liner my mother and Norman were planning to take to New York, my mother immediately arranged to cancel their own booking. Nobody today would dare to give the Murdochs or even the discredited Blacks the same kind of brush-off. Whereas today the media chiefs are the lords of all they survey, with none – not even the Prime Minister – daring to say them nay, then, thanks to the class system, there were still a few who would tell the cheeky urchins ‘to keep off the grass’.

Nor was Norman in any way unique. All his closest friends, Sir Warren Fisher and Sir Richard Hopkins, both in their time Head of the Treasury, and Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, were equally driven by the same classical republican ideals, which insisted that the highest purpose of man was to sacrifice himself, and his family, on the altar of the common weal – clearly far too lofty an ideal for the common man and only to be expected of the very uncommon man: the active citizen brought up to meet these exacting standards, either from birth or at least after five Spartan years at an English public school. Aristocracy, in this tradition, was much more a burden to be taken up than a privilege to be enjoyed, much more a sacrifice than an indulgence, Being born with a silver spoon in your mouth meant keeping your nose to the grindstone for life.

My mother completely shared Norman’s values. Not only was she a member of the London County Council, calling her racing greyhound Hammersmith (Hammy for short) after her constituency, but also a JP and social worker and, when the war began, a founder, under Lady Reading, of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), which is still going strong as the WRVS. I remember as a teenager, in the absence of any suitable female, having to model various possible uniforms for my mother to choose from – and hats too. After the war, she also became president of the Mental Health Association, forcing James the butler, a Great War veteran, much to his embarrassment, to shake the Association’s collection box in all the local pubs for what, at the time, was a most unpopular cause. Like Norman himself, she looked down from a great height on high society, quoting the great Lord Salisbury’s description of its members – which she thought her mother, Lady Alice, might have actually heard – as ‘dwarfed, languid, nerveless, emasculated dilettantes’. No efforts were spared to deter her sons from sinking so low.

Lady Alice was another formative influence, and in the same league. Widowed in her early age by the death of her second husband, Major Robert Reyntiens, a dashing Belgian soldier who had been ADC (some said pimp) to King Leopold of the Belgians, she inherited shortly thereafter what remains of the great recusant Towneley property, stretching from Burnley in Lancashire to the Yorkshire border town of Todmorden at the other end of the wild Cliviger Gorge, which figures so romantically in Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Lancashire Witches. The house itself, Towneley Hall, a massive fortress dating back to the fifteenth century, had been bought by the Burnley Corporation and turned into a museum, which meant that the only available house on the estate for my grandmother to live in was the agent’s hideous late-Victorian villa, Dyneley, overlooking the gorge. Although the country was still rugged, much of its beauty had been tarnished by coal mining and the smoke-belching chimneys of the cotton mills – one of the reasons why so many of the old Lancashire families had moved south to less grimy climes. Strongly disapproving of absentee landlords, my grandmother decided to reverse the shameless exodus. It was a brave decision. Towneley estate was an oasis of old agricultural Lancashire in a great desert of industrial blight. Cliviger village, above which Dyneley perched, served the local mill and at the break of a summer’s day the sound of clogs could be heard in the distance. My grandmother’s smart friends could not understand why she wanted to go and live in such an outlandish place where there was no hunting and no social life – by which they meant no neighbours of the right sort. But she did not want to. It was a matter of duty. For six hundred years, since the time of Edward III, the Towneleys kept the flame of Catholicism burning bright in Lancashire, cruelly persecuted at times for their fidelity to the Old Faith, and my grandmother could think of no good reason not to continue honouring this ancient obligation. Moving north was certainly a great wrench. She loved the pleasures of fashionable life – her sister, Lady Goonie, a leading member of ‘the Souls’, was married to Winston Churchill’s brother, Jack; but no sooner did she inherit than she packed up in London and moved to Dyneley, where she gave over her life to good works – running the local Girl Guides, sitting on the County Council and on the Bench, and reviving the Towneley chapel in Burnley.

Admittedly Montagu Norman and my mother’s family were exceptionally, almost obsessively, public spirited and high principled and therefore potentially a threat to liberty because of their excess of zeal. But the great advantage of the old hereditary upper class was that, being a family association, it included all sorts – including its fair share of dandies and dilettantes – and Montagu Norman’s younger brother, R. C. Norman, who was allowed to live in the big house, was as elegantly and civilizedly relaxed as Montagu was driven and single minded. Ronnie Norman was what Max Weber called a grand rentier, entirely detached from the source of his income, entirely uninvolved in the day-today running of any organization – an agent ran his estate – and therefore able to look at the world from a great distance. By ‘detached’ Weber did not mean impersonal; he meant ‘un-embattled’ and ‘un-embroiled’. Most of us, until we are retired, think about everything with only half our minds, the other half being engaged in worrying about some unfinished business in the office or, if we are a farmer, about the weather or the price of grain. Ronnie Norman was not embattled or embroiled in this way at all. He occupied a more serene sphere. Not that he was idle: he was a great patron of the arts, a great reader, Chairman of the BBC* (then, as now, a part-time job), a devoted father of five, with a wide circle of close friends, including his old Cambridge contemporary, the historian G. M. Trevelyan, who later became Master of Trinity College, and his neighbour, the sculptor Henry Moore; but in all these roles it was his serenity, his detachment, that made him so exceptionally valuable, as it did in his role as brother of Montagu Norman. It was a good sibling combination since at weekends the younger brother’s passion for domestic felicity perfectly complemented the older’s passion for public duty, and vice versa, thereby helping to ensure that in one upper-class family the interest of the State and the interest of the individual were both kept in happy balance. One such miniscule concentration of unofficial power and influence, of course, would count for little; but multiplied into tens of thousands of comparable grandee family concentrations spread across the land, all coming from the same background, with many actually related, certainly did add up to something.

What was that something? I think it was an alternative vision of a good life; a vision beyond the range of the bourgeois or proletarian imagination. In this world, there was no sense of having been frightened into public life by fear of socialism, or driven into it on behalf of the workers. So far as it is humanly possible, ‘interest’ did not come into it. Because the Normans, who had had it ‘made’ from birth, did not have to better their own lot, they felt in duty bound, in their different fashions, to fight for the public good. In no sense did they think this made them superior to those who came from less fortunate circumstances. Comparable public spirit, I was brought up to believe, could be found in all classes; the only difference was that it was easier for some to be active democrats – that is, to participate directly in the nation’s government and law making and to lead a socially responsible life – than it was for others. This was the idea of aristocracy transformed into democratic terms. Far from the existence of a privileged group spared from the strivings and struggles of their fellow citizens being incompatible with democracy, it was in practice, we believed, a necessary condition of democracy. Has this ceased to be true? I rather doubt it. For while Britain is more democratic socially today than it was, I doubt whether it is more democratic politically, in the sense of more people feeling effectively in charge of the State. Then, a class with connections stretching across the whole kingdom felt in charge; today, that feeling would seem to be limited to a succession of small groups of political professionals and political journalists, here today and gone tomorrow, with few connections outside Westminster.

Another lesson from those days also sticks in my mind: the extent to which an hereditary aristocracy, being a civil association made up of families, helped to keep the lines of communication open between the various self-contained and often feuding elites – political, bureaucratic, artistic, religious, sporting, and so on. Again, the extended Norman family (or firm) was a good example of this, since house parties would often include senior members of most of the various elites – one in the Cabinet Office, one in the War Office, one in the City, one in the legal profession, one a racing enthusiast – whose weekday narrowness of vision and exclusive concern with their own separate sections of the governing order would quickly dissolve, allowing the unifying ties of kinship to re-exert their hold. Nowadays, of course, British society is incomparably more compartmentalized than it used to be, and members of the various elites only intermingle at such artificial gatherings as ‘interdisciplinary conferences’, international congresses organized by the great foundations, or in special committees set up for that purpose. But, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘Men who meet only for definite serious purposes, and on official occasions, do not wholly meet.’ That ease of communication that comes naturally in the drawing room or in the salon or in the club cannot be artificially recreated in the symposium or seminar. Even the language is different. Whereas in the former it tended to be urbane, witty, and free-ranging, in the latter it tends to be boring, technical, and focused. Nietzsche made the point well when he said that the problem with the German language is that it developed not in courts and salons, as did English and French, but in universities and seminaries.

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 almost guaranteed and legitimized the continuation of hierarchy and social inequality. So if equality of access is to be regarded as essential 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 Wellington, 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 de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume i

Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic in the world.

Macaulay

I, at least, would rather have been governed by Lord Shaftesbury than Mr Cobden, by the gentlemen of England than by the Gradgrinds or Bounderbys of Coketown. There was something picturesque about his thick headiness, something monumental about his complacency. Compare him with the elegant trifler who was the gentleman of the ancien regime, or the rigid disciplinarian whom the German aristocracy provided, and he shines in comparison. He was often capable of a generous gesture. He was frequently tolerant, there could be about him a fine quixotism which was difficult not to admire. He threw up odd men of genius like Byron and Henry Cavendish, statesmen of public spirit like Lord John Russell and Hartington; he would found great galleries and establish the British Museum. He was very costly, and, in the mass depressing and dull. Yet, through it all, he always had the saving grace of a sense of humour … Nor is it certain that we shall replace him by a more admirable type … The gentle-man scourged us with whips. We must beware lest our new masters drive us to our toil with scorpions.

Harold J. Laski, the famously left wing Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, in his The Dangers of Being a, Gentleman, Basis Books, 1940

This essay will show: (1) why the aristocratic tradition peculiar to Britain, owing more to manners than to law, more to a religion of good behaviour than to any ideology, and most of all to a particular set of aristocrats at a particular moment in English history, is integral to the spirit of our English constitution; and (2) how getting rid of that tradition is not going to be at all like unburdening the body politic of a heavy handicap, and therefore facilitating its progress into the new millennium, but much more akin to the extraction of an essential organ without which it can no longer healthily survive: as potentially divisive and anarchic in its consequences as was France’s violent liquidation of its aristocracy in 1789, from which she did not recover balance and cohesion until Charles de Gaulle, after two empires, three revolutions and four republics, reunited the nation and restored its sanity in 1945, over a century and a half later.

A generation ago, such alarmism would have seemed absurdly pessimistic. Shortly after the last war my old tutor, Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished historian, published a little book called The Englishman and his History, in which he wrote: ‘When the aristocracy were sent to the laundry the dye ran out into the rest of the washing,’ by which he meant that the aristocratic tradition could be, and indeed so far had been, faithfully transferred to and absorbed by the natural aristocrats without pedigrees rising from below. This was true at the time of writing. Even Old Labour seemed quite happy – or at least resigned – to conform to this tradition. A passage in Aneurin Bevan’s* fine autobiography is very revealing in this respect. As a radical young miner in a South Wales colliery between the wars ‘his concern’, he wrote, ‘was with one practical question: where does power lie in this particular state of Britain? And how can it be attained by the workers?’ His answer was ‘Parliament: a sword pointed at the heart of property’.

In theory Bevan was right. Parliament could indeed act as a sword pointed at the heart of property. For Parliament unquestionably does have absolute power; more power than might be dreamt of by a totalitarian dictator – everything short, as some wag put it, ‘of the power to turn man into woman’, and even that limitation may soon be overcome. But in practice, this omnipotent institution, because the men operating it were either born into or had become part of an aristocracy whose conventions, manners, proprieties, and, above all, comforts discouraged – like all confident aristocracies – any ruthless use of centralized power, almost never did show cold steel, at least in peacetime, as Bevan soon discovered when he actually became an MP and encountered for himself the true spirit of the House of Commons. At first he thought he was in church:

The vaulted roofs and stained-glass windows, the rows of statues of great statesmen of the past, the echoing halls, the soft-footed attendants and the whispered conversation, contrast depressingly with the crowded meetings and the clang and clash of hot opinions he has just left behind in his election campaign. Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship; and the most conservative of all religions – ancestor worship.

The ‘clang and clash’ of opinion; too much of that was indeed what the spirit of the constitution was designed to avoid, and has succeeded in avoiding, give or take a few tense moments, for more than three hundred years. As for ancestor worship, Bevan was spot-on: the spirit of our constitution most certainly does involve ancestor worship, and very rightly so. Even Bevan, in his own idiosyncratic way, paid these ancestors the supreme compliment of emulation by eventually transforming himself, as Jonathan Rose tells us in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, into ‘a natural aristocrat’ who came to suspect that democracy would eventually destroy ‘legitimate [as well as illegitimate] superiority’. I remember, as a young journalist, in an interview with Bevan in the late 1950s over a tankard of champagne at the Café Royal, telling him that he was the simulacrum of Charles James Fox, one of the greatest of all of the eighteenth-century Whig grandees. His reaction was to grin from ear to ear, not even demurring when I went on to quote W. H. Mallock’s dictum that ‘only through aristocracy does a civilized democracy know itself’.

The trouble is that today’s political generation, as much among the ranks of the New Conservatives as of the New Labourites, are the first to have had no political education, the history of English statecraft having been eliminated from the curriculum on the grounds of its being too elitist, too much about top dogs who give the orders and not enough about bottom dogs who receive them. So our new rulers know only social history, which concentrates either on class, ethnicity, family, women, children, or universal history and/or local history:* none of the kinds of history, that is, likely to inspire the best and brightest of the current generation to walk in the footsteps of Chatham, Palmerston, Canning, Disraeli, Gladstone, and all the other parliamentary giants, most of whom they will never have heard of except through entertainment-level TV history, or TV programmes like Reputations specifically intended to knock these idols off their pedestals and expose their feet of clay.

What a change from former times. For nearly half a millennium the dream of English youth of the political class was fixed and focused on the House of Commons – ‘a modified, socialized arena for battle, drive and dominion’, as Sir Lewis Namier put it. Now, however, that story, which used to make a career in Parliament or in public life the highest dream of every schoolboy worth his salt, has been largely erased from memory. When Robin Day, a contemporary of mine, died recently, the obituarists could not understand why his successful life on screen had been no consolation for his failure to get into Parliament. In their eyes, to be a TV inquisitor was by far the more glamorous and envied vocation. And so indeed it has become, which is why Jeremy Paxman can get away with assuming all politicians from the start to be guilty rather than innocent, to be dishonourable rather than honourable gentlemen. How could it be otherwise? For without a knowledge of political history MPs are indeed like the rest of us – deserving of ridicule and censure. Only to those with a knowledge of English political history do they become larger than life figures: not because of their individual merit – by no means always conspicuous – but because of the impressive history of the office they hold.

As for the hereditary members of the House of Lords, their fate is worst of all, since not only is the current generation ignorant of their history but also of the very principles on which their authority rested. This no-go area in public knowledge and imagination leaves a deplorable gap in public debate. For whether we like it or not, the English aristocracy most certainly did play an essential role in forging and shaping Britain’s parliamentary institutions, and indeed in shaping almost all our great national institutions, including the Labour Party; so central a role that the venerable traditions they established have long survived the dissolution of the wealth, power, and status of the dukes, earls, and lords who originally called them forth; so central a role that those politicians who now want, using a new detergent called modernization, to rub out once and for all every trace of the true-blue dye, will find it difficult to do so without unravelling – pursuing Butterfield’s metaphor – ‘the historic garment itself’.

Here, let me make use of Michael Oakeshott’s historical abridgement*, which first brought home to me the unique role played by aristocracy in the development of England’s parliamentary government. Oakeshott tells the story of how towards the end of the Middle Ages there emerged, most spectacularly in Italy, a new kind of human being, the autonomous individual who wanted to be a figure in his own right rather than just an anonymous member of one of the many feudal groups – family, guild, village, church, etc. Such powerful and confident spirits, determined to distance themselves and stand out from their own kind, could be found at all social levels, as much at Court as in the counting house and as much in the hovel as in the baronial hall. For the first time on the human stage appeared Jacob Burckhardt’s* Uomo Unico, the man who, in the mastery of his circumstances, stood alone and was a law unto himself. Indeed by the middle of the sixteenth century such personalities had been so firmly established that they were beyond the range of mere suppression: not all of the severity of the Calvinist regime in Geneva, for example, was sufficient to quell the impulse to think and behave as an independent individual. The disposition to regard a high degree of individuality in conduct and in belief as the proper condition of mankind, and as the main ingredient of human happiness, had become one of the significant dispositions of modern European character, imposing itself upon art, upon religion, upon morality, upon industry and trade, and upon every kind of human relationship, from husband and wife to ruler and subject.

Naturally, one of the first demands of those intent upon exploring the intimations of individuality was for new instruments of government that would allow them to carry on with such explorations without too much let or hindrance; for instruments of government suitable for a society understood as an association of individuals, the prime purpose of which was to seek the most practical adjustments for the avoidance of collision between individuals. A new manner of governing and of being governed appropriate to individuals appeared first in England, in the Netherlands, and in Switzerland, and was later (in various idioms) extended to other parts of Western Europe and the United States. It came to be called parliamentary government.

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