In Defence of Aristocracy

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.