The establishment is back at the heart of government. It's as if the last 100 years had never happened As exhausted Labour ministers embraced opposition with an emotion close to relief, the party's equally exhausted staff assumed they could relax. Instead of being allowed to recuperate, however, they were overwhelmed by thousands of angry men and women clamouring to join. The sight of Nick Clegg and David Cameron joshing in the grounds of Downing Street had rammed home a truth about Britain that all the talk of "inclusion" and "diversity" obscures. We live in the most class-ridden society in western Europe, and it is becoming more sclerotic and more hierarchical by the year. Despite the admirable attempts to combat sexism, racism and homophobia, the life-defining issue for children is not their skin colour, gender or sexuality, still less their intrinsic talent, but how much their parents are prepared to spend on their education, and what friendships they can exploit and contacts they can manipulate on their little darlings' behalf thereafter. Look at our new government. Satirists caricature Liberals – and I think we can now stop calling them "Liberal Democrats" as their alliance with the right has sundered their links with the social democratic tradition – as muesli-munching, Observer-reading, real-ale-drinking members of the progressive middle class. The events of last week have smashed that caricature into 1,000 pieces. Instead of going with Labour, the leaders of middle-class liberalism went into David Cameron's coalition. Far from adding grit to an administration dominated by the children of the rich, they toffed it up and raised the average cabinet member's net worth by tens of thousands of pounds. As so often, foreign journalists see Britain more clearly than we do. During the campaign, a puzzled Susanne Gelhard, London correspondent for German radio station ZDF, noticed that the British media talked incessantly about Cameron's privileged background, but never added that Clegg's was no different. "How does he do it?" she asked. "I think he must have very good PR management." So he does. When you look at his history, you discover that his parents, who now live in some style in a chateau in the south of France, sent him to Westminster, a private school that has never seen itself as second best to Eton. On leaving Cambridge, he behaved in a manner any young Tory on the make would recognise by accepting the patronage of Lord Carrington and Lord Brittan. He married well. His Spanish wife Miriam is not only a successful lawyer bringing in a six-figure salary, but is also a Catholic. Her belief in the supernatural has the advantage of allowing the atheist Clegg to avoid the worst of the state education system and send his children to a faith school. Chris Huhne is another Westminster old boy. He made his fortune in the City before moving into journalism and politics. He also owns seven homes. Maybe I'm being chippy, but that strikes me as at least five homes too many. I could go on – David Laws is another public school boy who did well in the City – but the point to keep in mind is that whenever the powerful tell you that class politics are over in Britain, you can be sure that the class politics of the wealthy will be back with a vengeance. Lord Adonis, one of Labour's negotiators in the frantic talks, hints strongly that a freemasonry of the privileged determined the fate of the country. "The Liberals are pretending there was no alternative," he told me. "But they could have formed an alliance with Labour. Nick Clegg went to the Tories not because he had to but because he chose to." Labour and the Liberals will contest the history of the 2010 election for years, and accusations of betrayal will accompany each version, but when the BBC's usually impartial political editor agrees with Adonis that Clegg and Cameron discovered that they were more united by class than divided by politics it is worth taking notice. Only the miserable Vince Cable is out of place in the new government. A good social democrat who threw in his lot with the Tories, he looks like a man with a mortal sin on his conscience. In an analysis of the new political class it will release tomorrow, the Sutton Trust, a charity that is trying to loosen the bonds of British society, will point out that it is not enough to say that the elite is increasingly drawn from the 7% of the population educated at privateschools. At the pinnacle of politics and many other professions the best jobs are going to old boys not of private schools but of the top 1% of private schools – Eton, Westminster, St Paul's, Radley and Rugby, whose annual fees of £25,000 or more are beyond the means of all but the richest. You cannot blame our new leaders for their birth or their education, but you can blame them for their refusal to expand their horizons. Robert Yates, the author of a forthcoming book on class in Britain, makes a nice comparison between Cameron, Clegg and Barack Obama. In many ways, Obama followed the standard career path of an American politician. He did well at Harvard and ingratiated himself with Democratic party establishment. But for three years he chose to work as a community organiser in the slums of Chicago. Republicans deride him for it, but the experience of walking in other men's shoes has made him a more rounded and convincing politician. Contrast him with David Laws. As Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury he will have to impose cuts that will cause destitution if they fall on the wrong people. Yet he made no effort in his progress from private school to Oxbridge to the City to the cabinet to explore or understand his own country. I am not surprised that the sight of rejoicing public school boys is causing leftists to shake themselves because nothing could have been more unexpected 50 years ago. When the then Conservative establishment made Sir Alec Douglas-Home our last Etonian prime minister in 1963, comedians ridiculed him to within an inch of his life. He was an establishment relic stopping a supposedly meritocratic country realising its potential. Now Fleet Street and BBC editors, who once looked for street-wise crime reporters or war correspondents who could file under fire, are scrambling to hire Old Etonians so they can cover the social order of the 21st century. They are often the editors' old chums, for as Sutton Trust has shown, no business is as dominated by public school boys as the media. The left cannot be too preachy, however, and it must accept its responsibility for once. Since Labour began the abolition of the grammar schools, a politically correct bodyguard of pseudo-egalitarians has protected the rise of the new ruling class. Former ministers told me how when they tried to introduce programmes to allow the clever children of the working and middle classes to thrive, teaching unions and Department for Education civil servants, who ministers knew sent their own children to private and grammar schools, damned them for their "elitism". It was as if the headmaster of Eton had bribed leftish educationalists to nobble the competition. The result of rich parents' drive for advantage and the idiotic left's determination to help them can be seen in the faces missing from the cabinet. The struggles of the working-class movement of the 1900s are not represented at all. The rage of the suffragettes in the 1910s and the second wave of feminists in the 1970s has declined to a whimper, and succeeded merely in propelling the docile figure of Theresa May to high office. The children of the new Commonwealth immigrants of the 1950s feature not at all among the cabinet's elected members. Meanwhile, the Thatcherite revolt of the 1980s is now so infirm it could not bring David Davis, the only senior Tory left who can speak the language of the lower-middle class, back into Cameron's circle. Look hard at a picture of our new government, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the 20th century never happened.Welcome to Britain in 2010 where money + class = power
Sunday, 16 May 2010
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