Francis Charteris probably didn’t need an extra leg-up in life. Later to be known as Lord Elcho and later still to become the 10th Earl of Wemyss, he was heir to a title that had successfully weathered the ructions of the Stuart era and the torpor of the Hanoverian. As an Etonian, he was already versed in the conventions of cricket, sub-fusc and quadrangle. All the same, when he arrived at Christ Church, Oxford for his university interview in 1837, he was asked a single question: “How’s your father?”
This was just another frictionless advance in a biography that resembles a man sock-skating down a gilded corridor: trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, Junior Lord of the Treasury, aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria. His descendants had the same knack. There are the direct recipients of his wealth and title, currently held by the landowner, trepanation exponent and sometime Ukip donor James Charteris. But his progeny has spun out across the Establishment. Take his great-grandson Martin, who became Baron Charteris in his own right for his work as one of Elizabeth II’s crow-suited courtiers, and earned himself a walk-on portrayal in The Crown.
The Charteris family story personifies all of the most enduring stereotypes about the British elite: a self-replicating caste singularly adept at keeping elite positions confined to a small pool of blue blood. It may therefore be galling to learn from Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves’s new survey, Born to Rule, that these aren’t just stereotypes. Notwithstanding several caveats, evolutions and subtleties, something like the Charteris trajectory has governed much of British history over the past century, and by this account continues to do so.
Friedman and Reeves boast that their work is “underpinned by the most comprehensive dataset of the British elite that has ever been produced”. By this they mean Who’s Who, the biographical reference book that has served as the atlas of our high society since the Victorian period. Its volumes are compiled semi-secretively. While some of its current crop of 33,000 individuals are entered automatically (MPs, King’s Counsels, FTSE100 CEOs), the rest are elected by a mysterious “board”, whose operations and criteria are fiercely guarded. This, Born to Rule judges, is our elite, webbed by links of government, business and influence. And they further refine it down to a 6,000-strong “wealth elite” – those lucky enough to appear in both Who’s Who and in the top 1 per cent of wealth distribution.
Through their analysis of schooling, hobbies and background from Who’s Who, a questionnaire of several thousand of its living members, and deeper interviews with several hundred more, Friedman and Reeves have built up an impressive longitudinal study of the British upper crust. And, despite cutting through numerous stereotypes, caricatures and presuppositions, their argument is dead simple. Through a process that everyone in Britain can instinctively recognise – a collaboration of inherited wealth, public schools and Oxbridge – the composition and reproductive capacities of the British elite remained relatively consistent from the late 19th century to the late 20th. Powerful individuals and families may rise and fall. But the story of the British elite is largely one of ossified continuity, with only trickling change.
Almost every statistic in this figure-heavy and graph-streaked book could launch a Guardian column. The British elite today is more than 80 per cent male, 96.8 per cent white and overwhelmingly concentrated in London (it keeps annexes in Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, with a pied-à-terre in Manchester). It is around 35 per cent Oxbridge educated and 47 per cent privately educated. An alumnus of one of the nine most established Clarendon public schools is 52 times more likely to enter the elite than an average citizen.
These are the vectors of elite reproduction. More stunning is their iterative powers, some holding firm since the days of Palmerston’s first premiership: the percentage of entrants whose parents’ wealth at death was in the top 1 per cent of national wealth is the same now as the 1850s. And when Friedman and Reeves traced more than 100 random families from the first editions of Who’s Who to today, 57 per cent had descendants who had later made the cut. In other words, if you have a family member in the elite, you are 120 times more likely to get there too compared with everyone else.
Shorter chapters narrate more recent trends: elite women are on the rise, although they benefit from some of the same skewed institutional patterns as men, as are ethnic minorities, though there is considerable variation between different groups. But, having made an impressive stab at telling us who our elites are, Born to Rule also has a crack at telling us how they think. Here the book is scratchier, simply because while Merchant Taylors’ is clearly a public school, defining and diagnosing “progressive” politics at scale is more difficult. Nonetheless, they reach some interesting conclusions, showing for instance that the notion of a cohesive “liberal elite” is something of a canard, with considerable ideological variation within society’s upper echelons.
The main achievement of Born to Rule is one of definition, not political description. But such an approach neglects what is arguably the more revolutionary story of the British elite in this period. Somewhere along the way, grouse moor is abandoned for trading floor, and frock coats and ermine folded away for gilets and quarter-zips. The death of one sort of upper class has been followed by the birth of another. It’s a less precise story than a bulging data set can tell. But in terms of the character of our ruling class, it’s no less important.
It partially shows up in the sociology, appearing tangentially in two of Born to Rule’s best chapters. First there is what Friedman and Reeves call the rise of a “cosplay of ordinariness”, a frantic attempt on behalf of their interviewees to demonstrate devotion to the modern elite’s article of faith: meritocracy. This is an elite of grafters, one that frenetically diminishes its inherited advantages (often to the point of self-deception), bristles at the very notion of an “elite”, and spins self-justifying creation myths in a way all of us are familiar with (the tenement-born grandmother, the “actually” working-class uncle). These are the children of Dickens’s Mr Bounderby, proudly flaunting the receipts of their hardship.
As Friedman and Reeves point out, this desperation to be part of some sort of deserving rich is a category difference from elites of the early-20th century, who had no such entrepreneurial asceticism. As Cyril Connolly wrote in 1938, reflecting on the Eton he knew, “intelligence was a deformity which must be concealed; a public school taught one to conceal it as a good tailor hides a paunch or a hump”. He and his contemporaries – including those studied in Born to Rule – made no secret of their sloth. They were frank about their advantages, and unashamed of the roles that accompanied them. A noblesse oblige, as compared with our modern noblesse anxiéuse.
In culture, too, the late Victorian elite was admirably open about its bluff philistinism (“Cricket, field sports, hunting, shooting; bred most the horses in his stables,” reads one typical list of hobbies from Who’s Who). But after the First World War, this red-faced gamesmanship declined to be replaced by a Bloomsbury-approved palette: literature, opera, furniture, fine art. And this has since been replaced in turn by a new form of Everyman omnivorousness, modern elites striving to seem as comfortable at the pub as the piano recital.
These changes are the outlines of a more fundamental shift. The Victorian-Edwardian elite was a genuine composite – a fusion between what was left of the agrarian landowning class and a newer breed of haut bourgeois professionals. It found a compromise in the silhouette of “the gentleman”, the dominant upper-class archetype well into the 20th century. And it had an ideology, constructed around Christian duties and superpower complacency. This was a patrician elite with a purpose: drummed to take noble captaincy of some piece of state or industry, schooled to expect imperial glory along the way.
Today this class is long gone. Instead, we find ourselves with a cosmopolitan, credentialled elite, an MA aristocracy. With prestige no longer to be found at the Admiralty or in the Church, it clusters (mainly around the skirts of the City) in Britain’s few remaining competitive fields: law, banking, tech and media. And the fragmented attitude of anti-highbrow individualism that Born to Rule registers is part of this class’s faceless distinction. It is not a Victorian leisure elite, nor is it differentiated by cultural superiority like 20th-century gentlemen. Instead it must simply justify its market value, the most important vector of elite reproduction in a capitalist democracy.
The public schools and establishment universities might still be producing this elite, but only because they’ve adapted to the new age. Eton Rifles is out, replaced by advanced Stem and kindergarten computer science. And it’s fitting that elite British education is an export industry now, subsidised in particular by the scions of an East Asian super-rich. What they aim to produce is not so much a domestic ruling class but an international elite, fit to fill the rosters of global business. Any descendant of Francis Charteris might pass through the same institutional furnaces as their ancestor, but they’d be smelted and beaten into a very different alloy. These levelling trends are only set to continue. Most people admitted to Who’s Who are around 50. Who knows what the fintech elite of 2054 will list as their hobbies: Peloton and IQ testing?
Thanks to the propaganda of the period drama, our vision of our upper class is hopelessly anachronistic. The general public remains more familiar with marquises and under-butlers than it is with consultancy or corporate law. Amid such misconceptions, Born to Rule is an important attempt to take the measure of our new and evolved elite. And within a growing subgenre of polemical writing (Engines of Privilege by David Kynaston and Francis Green; Simon Kuper’s twin studies Chums and Good Chaps) it provides much-needed academic clarity.
Class has now returned to British politics, but class war is very difficult to wage. Look at our Prime Minister: a knighted footballer without a favourite novel who exchanged pebbledash and grammar school for St Edmund Hall and Middle Temple. Starmer is a Frankenstein’s creature of class signifiers. He has assembled one of the most working-class cabinets in British history but he’ll always reek of cufflinks and shiny shoes. And unlike Harold Wilson, “Starmer’s people” have no ancien régime left to rally against. The modern elite doesn’t exhibit itself with old boys’ ties, let alone horse and carriage. It Ubers about London open-necked, free from political identification or scrutiny.
In Friedman and Reeves’s conclusion, they suggest several admirable policy decisions to loosen the stranglehold they identify. One (applying VAT to private-school fees) featured in Labour’s first King’s Speech. Others – reforming council tax, raising a wealth tax, a cap on private-school students attending Russell Group universities – likely exceed the political capital of this government. But beyond public policy, the achievement of this fascinating book should be to spark a broader reconsideration of our new ruling caste: no longer the seigneurial elite so beloved of Evelyn Waugh, but a successor class to Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe”.
Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite
Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves
Harvard University Press, 328pp, £20
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[See also: How motherhood was weaponised]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire