Manchester City fans in the stands during their match against Fulham.
Credit: Reuters File Photo
In 1995, the Britpop band Pulp had a hit with Common People. The song satirized the elite’s longing to be ordinary, describing a love affair between the group’s frontman Jarvis Cocker and a fellow art-school student from a posh background. “You wanna live like common people. You wanna see whatever common people see, wanna sleep with common people, You wanna sleep with common people … Like me.”
The British are wedded to the idea that they are ruled by an elite of peculiar people who have different habits and attitudes from the rest of us — a caste of Jacob Rees-Mogg lookalikes, as it were. I have on my shelf a row of books on upper Britain with words like “entitled,” “privileged,” and “posh” in the title. The paperback of Owen Jones’ The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It has a cartoon of a bowler hat on the cover — despite that the only people who wear bowler hats these days are tourist guides and hotel bell hops.
It was certainly once the case that successful Britons cultivated distinctive habits. Between 1800 and 1920, they devoted their leisure time to hunting, shooting and fishing. To be a member of the elite in good standing, you had to have access to a country pad with a gun room and a grouse moor. From 1920 onwards, they increasingly prided themselves on their highbrow tastes. The radio program Desert Island Discs featured a succession of grandees who dazzled the audience with their knowledge of classical music, art and literature. For his trip to the island, the politician Enoch Powell chose four pieces by Wagner, out of a maximum of eight pieces, along with the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.
A new book by two London School of Economics-based sociologists — Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite — demonstrates that Jarvis Cocker is closer to the truth than the peddlers of the “bowler hat” theory. Most members of today’s elite go out of their way to prove how ordinary they are (our authors introduce the nice concept of a “symbolic market for ordinariness”). They like to recall working-class ancestors even if they have to go back several generations (“my great great grandfather was a toolmaker”). They emphasize how much they had to struggle during their childhoods even if they went to fee-paying schools. So many members of the elite worry about inequality that it is almost a mark of elite status.
Our sociologists trawled through Who’s Who, a directory of influential people published annually by British company A & C Black since the mid-1800s, and Desert Island Discs to get inside the mind of today’s most prominent. They discovered an almost limitless supply of ordinariness. Elite people, broadly defined as those who make it onto the Who’s Who list, boast about having the same sort of hobbies as the rest of us (football, films, drinking beer) and listening to exactly the same mixture of pop music and classical favorites. Today’s politicians are more likely to choose Oasis than Wagner as their desert island disc, for example.
There is a good deal of shapeshifting here. Members of the current elite are often more cultivated than they let on: Tickets to opera house Glyndebourne sell out in a flash. They can also be opportunistic in their ordinariness: Now that Oxford and Cambridge make great efforts to recruit from the state sector, ambitious parents send their children to successful state schools, or at the very least, sixth-form colleges — not because they have discovered a social conscience, but because they think it is a better way of securing advantage.
The important thing is the face you put on in public. You must make sure that you have at least one “common man” pastime. Football is the current favorite among Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cronies just as it was among Tony Blair’s. You must learn how to conceal any high-brow tastes or connections behind a façade of ordinariness.
“Façade” is the operative word. The book’s authors demonstrate that the idea, fondly promoted by its members, that today’s elite are fundamentally different from their predecessors — in being meritocratic and connection-free — is, at best, a stretch. The number of people who have risen from working-class backgrounds has certainly increased since the Second World War. The number of women who have become active members of the establishment rather than plus-ones has, of course, exploded.
But there is also a lot of self-delusion going on: The sociologists found that 43 per cent of members of today’s British elite who claimed to come from working-class families actually came from middle-class or professional ones. They also catalogue the continuing “propulsive power” of privilege. Some 76 per cent of today’s members of Who’s Who come from families where one or both parents were doing professional or managerial work, and at least 15 per cent had a parent who had received an honor such as a knighthood or an OBE. A successful background not only provides you with a superior education and set of contacts; it also gives you the luxury of failure and false starts before you start climbing the ladder of success.
Among the many sins that Tory toffs such as Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson have committed is to reinforce the “bowler hat” theory of privilege. The truth about today’s Britain is actually more interesting: Privilege is much more likely to hide behind a veneer of ordinariness than to boast about its pedigree. The Labour Party, for instance, is webbed with family connections: Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is the wife of a senior civil servant and sister of another Labour MP. And the ever-so-modern City of London is full of people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths.
Jarvis Cocker was right: All this talk of “the common people” conceals a much more class-bound reality.