The New Elites: A Career in the Masses

By George Walden

'You must read it.' Andrew Marr
Far from becoming classless, Britain's elite is increasingly formed by a select group of professional egalitarians. Rather than aim to raise popular aspirations, they exploit mass taste, mass gullibility, mass spending power for their personal advancement. Far from becoming classless, Britain's elite is increasingly formed by a select group of professional egalitarians. Rather than aim to raise popular aspirations, they exploit mass taste, mass gullibility, mass spending power for their personal advancement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781783340347

George Walden

A diplomat involved in negotiations with Brussels, as well as with Russia and China, then as an MP, Minister for Higher Education, and occasional speech-writer for Margaret Thatcher, George Walden’s international and political careers make him uniquely placed to confront questions about Britain’s future. He has three children, and is currently a journalist and novelist (under the pen name Joseph Clyde). He lives in South West London.

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Praise

‘In a bland world, here is a book on the right subject you have to read it’

Andrew Marr

‘Like a demon ten-pin bowler, George Walden has eyed his target with fevered contempt and, with one majestic sweep of his bowling arm, has scattered an entire regiment’

The Times

‘If humbuggery is, more than ever, the English disease, Walden is its pitiless diagnostician ... in a brilliant parable, Walden depicts Commerce, Politics and the Media in a ménage a trois’

Sunday Times

‘Unputdownable ... full of teasing quotations, challenging ideas and truly fabulous turns of phrase, Walden has produced a slim but brilliant volume that you will, by turns, want to fling at the wall and read out loud to your friends ... hugely enjoyable’

Gyles Brandreth, Good Book Guide

‘Walden has a fine eye for stupidities, and a very sharp pen ... his book presents a brilliant analysis of the inverted snobbery of the new elite, showing how our new masters, many of them from upper-middle-class backgrounds, affect to despise the very class to which they belong’

Sunday Telegraph

‘George Walden doesn’t mince his words ... the book is highly entertaining, languidly slaying sacred cows and dodging the secret police of the populist elites. But it is also meant very seriously, and, even when its arguments invite equally serious dissent, it is not merely striking stances’

Times Literary Supplement

Author Biography

George Walden was educated at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, and Jesus College, Cambridge, and spent periods at Moscow, Hong Kong and Harvard universities, and at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in Paris. From 1962 to 1983 he worked for the British Foreign Office, specialising in Russia, China and France, and was Principal Private Secretary to David Owen and Lord Carrington.

From 1983 to 1997 he was Conservative MP for Buckingham, and from 1985 to 1987 Minister for Higher Education. He was chairman of the Booker Prize in 1995, and later of the Russian Booker Prize.

In 1997 Walden gave up his seat and left politics to write. His memoirs Lucky George were published in 1999, followed by The New Elites, Who Is a Dandy?, God Won’t Save America, China: A Wolf In The World?, Time to Emigrate?, and Exit From Brexit. Under the pen name Joseph Clyde he has written three thrillers around the character of MI5 agent Tony Underwood: A State of Fear, The Oligarch, and The China Maze.

Boris Johnson

Populists in Power

This book argued that Britain was increasingly dominated by an upper-caste elite of anti-elitists, and that top-down populism was a perversion of democracy, the sickness of the age. It is tempting to review the damage our new elites have inflicted on culture and the media since its first edition was published, yet for this new edition politics must take priority.

Our country faces its biggest crisis since the war, in which the malign forces I wrote about are in power. In the guise of super-patriots, in their right-wing form the new elites have emerged as the principal threat not just to the welfare and stability of the country, but to the very existence of a United Kingdom.

Together the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit risk wrecking the economy, inciting social and ethnic unrest and breaking up the country. Our leaders cannot be blamed for the virus, but their bungled response has been conditioned by culpable insouciance and Brexit preoccupations. Boris Johnson’s ministerial appointments were dictated not by talent or experience but clan-like loyalty on Europe, leaving us facing the onslaught of the virus with the lowest calibre Cabinet in memory.

How did we get here? For 33 years, from 1964 to 1997, on left and right state-educated leaders were in charge. Except for Gordon Brown and Teresa May our most recent Prime Ministers have been products of our most exclusive schools. Some of the best people I have worked with in diplomacy, politics and journalism have been Etonians, notably Lord Carrington, Foreign Secretary and former tank commander. Yet we live in an era of supposedly open elites, which makes our reversion to entitled but unproven leaders remarkable. Today we are in a tank commanded by Boris Johnson.

In compensation for their social origins, Blair, Cameron and Johnson have adopted an insinuating style with the public, something neither Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher nor Major felt obliged to do. It is no coincidence that the origins and endgame of Brexit were played out during our privileged leaders’ premierships.

Blair and Cameron were Remainers yet together they did much to bring Brexit about. The main driver of the vote was immigration. Whether you support or oppose it is not the point; I was a Remainer troubled by the most likely public reaction to the biggest and swiftest inflow of migrants in our history.

In 1997 and again in 2004, Blair the patrician liberal and canny politico (immigrants vote Labour) initiated two waves that, including illegals, would help raise the population sharply by many millions of souls. (By 2018 the non-UK born population stood at 9.3 million—just over 14% of the total, of whom 3.6 million were from the EU and 5.7 million from outside.) Jim Callaghan or Margaret Thatcher would have been more conscious of the social risks. Secure in his sense of moral ascendency, Blair has never expressed regret for his role in Brexit. We see a similar self-certainty over the Iraq war.

Resentment was concentrated amongst those most likely to suffer, economically or from pressure on housing, schools, the NHS. BBC managers helped bottle up discontent by avoiding discussion. Repressed anger frequently focussed on Muslims for cultural as well as racist reasons or terrorist fears, and because non-EU migrants were the majority.

Hence a huge paradox. In the 2016 referendum many voted Leave in the belief—fostered by UKIP, Johnson, Gove et al.—that Brexit would stem immigration from all sources. In this sense Dominic Cummings’s slogan ‘Take Back Control’ from Europe was a lie: the majority being non-European, control lay largely in British hands already.

David Cameron’s responsibility lay mostly in a character failing not untypical of his caste. ‘Chillaxing’—the journalists’ term for his laid-back approach—was not just the style but the man. From Eton onwards everything in his professional life had come easily. A smooth and polished operator, his highly-paid early career as a PR fixer for the downmarket TV company Carlton—the perfect new elite gig—was followed by a comfortable Commons seat and the Tory leadership four years later, though, like Blair, he had nil ministerial experience. Not that self-confidence was ever lacking, and elections had a habit of going his way. So why not a referendum on Europe?

Fatally ill-equipped to gauge the depth of disquiet on immigration, it scarcely occurred to him that he might lose. Having toured the North some years previously I myself described the tensions stoked by Blair’s mass influx in my book Time to Emigrate? On immigration I warned that ‘over-abrupt changes could evoke an extreme response.’ When the referendum came I predicted a Brexit victory by 51%.

So it was that, each in his patrician way, Blair and Cameron unwittingly brought the Tory right-wing nationalists to power, in the form of their new elite brother Boris Johnson.

A showman par excellence, Johnson’s soft sell to a celebrity-soused public, complete with quasi-aristocratic flippancy, indolence and quirkiness, went along with a ruthlessly diva-like ego. In him new-elite populism—the circus barker rhetoric and scarcely suppressed smirk in the midst of national peril—blends with a hardcore of vengefulness and intolerance, frequently meted out by his chief adviser/executive Dominic Cummings.

Without rooted opinions or economic understanding, in some respects Johnson is an accidental leader. Deep in himself I doubt whether he seriously wanted to be Prime Minister; too much like hard work. With his schoolmate Cameron to rival, above all he wanted to have been one. At heart he is not a politician at all, but a new elite chancer, not unlike the roguish cardsharp Khlestakov in Gogol’s The Government Inspector who, when mistaken by impressionable rustics for the visiting bigwig, goes along with the game.

Attacks by him and his well-heeled coterie on pro-Europeans as the true elitists are mere student politics, yet there are echoes of Roundheads versus Cavaliers—the flamboyant, rabble-rousing roustabouts against the colourless administrators of the system. If Johnson falls or resigns someone from his magic circle is likely to replace him. Currently the favourite is Rishi Sunak, an able Wykehamist ultra-patriot of South-Asian parentage married to the daughter of a billionaire. Curious to see expensively educated people of Indian descent promoting Brexit to racist-inclined folk on the right.

Meanwhile, for the first time in his life Johnson faces un-shirkable responsibilities (being Mayor of London, elected by a mere 18% of voters, was largely another ego trip.) With no strategy to handle the coronavirus, his casual sub-Trumpian mendacities and lethal blunders have helped bring sickness and death beyond that suffered by any European country. As the corpses mount (65,000 to date) the image of him grinning and demonstratively shaking hands in a hospital as the virus took hold will not easily fade

What links Johnson the Latin-spouting wordsmith to the dumbing-down new elites on the cultural left? One example suffices. Proclaiming a wish to level up educational opportunities, he made Gavin Williamson Secretary of State, a man widely derided as much for his simple-minded incompetence as for his slavish loyalty to his boss on Brexit. Our Prime Minister’s convictions on education are as shallow and self-serving as on so much else. The OECD tells us that the gap between state and private achievement is the widest in the Western world, but for Johnson Brexit comes first. Snug in his small entitled world, why would he promote competition?

Governing is a fag, though he is not really in charge of Number Ten. Much of his administration is devolved to Dominic Cummings, his Mosca. In Ben Johnson’s satire Volpone Mosca (the fly) is a smart factotum to his eponymous boss, coming up with the necessary ruse or deception when his master is in trouble.

The first thing the two have it common, beyond a privileged background and indifference to the truth (see Cummings’ retrospective adjustment of a blog to suggest he had foreseen Covid-19) is a status-enhancing affectation of down-dressing. Clothes—‘topmost evanescent froth’ in Thomas Carlyle’s words—are to them mightily important. From Mosca’s sagging trousers to his master’s protruding shirt, everything is a meticulously cultivated fraud on the public.

Unwilling to believe that the next generation would continue to play along with the anti-elite charades of their betters, in the book I finish on a hopeful note. Faced with painfully similar populist leaders in Britain and America, and with the profoundly cankered Conservative and Republican parties mishandling the pandemic in depressingly similar ways, today I would have been less upbeat.

Instead of bounding about touting the ‘world-beating’ economy of ‘global Britain’, our leader is more likely to spend the rest of his term struggling against the malignant consequences of Covid and Brexit—many of them his own making.

We must hope that, like Trump, he turns out to be a one-term, one-man show. So much is poorly staged histrionics that again theatrical parallels recur. Already our showman Prime Minister, like Archie Rice, John Osborne’s failing music-hall performer in The Entertainer, is looking down at the gills. Rice, a critic wrote, embodied where Britain was heading at the time: ‘the decline, the sourness, the ashes of old glory.’ After only a year on stage, already the Johnson jokes are not going across the way they did.

Introduction

Three things this book is not. It is not another attack on political correctness, whose postulates, when they are justified, can be no more than nagging platitudes, and whose extravagances have long since been laughed to scorn. It is not a defence of elites as currently conceived, who for all the obloquy heaped on them are mostly smart or rich enough to take care of themselves. Nor is this book a dirge about decline. Cultural lamentations can be diverting from the pen of Flaubert (‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a sea of shit is beating against the walls, it’s enough to bring them down’) and sobering from William Morris (‘That fatal division of men into the educated and degraded classes which capitalist commerce has encouraged’), but in our own day they are somehow dispiriting. The targets are unmissable, and in as much as complaints about decline are justified, they too have become platitudes. Certainly the price of a worthwhile culture is eternal vigilance, though as Marshall McLuhan observed, the price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

Moaning about mass culture seems especially pointless. However you define ‘the masses’, theirs is the leading chorus of the times. The point is that choruses can perform well or badly. The singers are guided by conductors, martinets sometimes, with their eyes fixed on stardom and a vulgarized interpretation of the score. It is they, the populists in politics, in business, the media and the arts, who are the subject of this book. This too may appear to present an easy target, yet the problem with populism is that it is popular. Criticizing it involves asking why it is that the public tends to succumb, which involves appearing to sit in judgement on The People. To that extent this book is a critique of the workings of democracy, or ultra-democracy as I prefer to call it. It ought to be possible for democracies to stand outside themselves and take an objective look (if they don’t, who will?), but in the contemporary climate raising a finger at The People will be greeted as disapprovingly as spitting in church.

The interaction between populism and its victims is rarely discussed. There is a shiftiness surrounding the subject, an atmosphere of nerviness where you can see in people’s eyes that they are preparing to range themselves on the side of virtue before a word is spoken. I fancy the eyes of the God-fearing nineteenth-century bon bourgeois had exactly the same look when anything that fell outside the confines of what could be decently said was broached. A similar prissiness afflicts our era, though this time it is The People (whoever they might be) whose tastes and preferences are deemed beyond reproach.

This book is based on assumptions which, if not shared by the reader, will render it incomprehensible. I take it as self-evident that, providing they are not exclusive, elites are not just defensible but desirable in a democracy. My point is the difference between true and bogus, fertile and sterile elites. Genuine, democratic elites cannot be inimical to the public interest, since by definition they will be open, able and humane. Otherwise they forfeit their claim to the description. Bogus elites possess no true distinction and depend for their ascendancy on money and/or membership of a particular social caste. Today they are more likely to be populist opportunists. Sometimes they contrive to be both.

My second assumption is that Britain is a country where populist elites have never been more powerful or ubiquitous. If they escape detection and criticism it is because (and this is my third assumption) our thinking about elites and the masses remains congealed in Left/Right configurations, a kind of arrested development that remains widespread in our culture. Only by abstracting oneself from these decayed conventions is it possible to see what is happening, not in two-dimensional caricature, but in the round.

Three key terms—democracy, the elites and the masses—seem to me in need of redefinition. In this book each will be used in what some may feel to be the opposite of its normal sense. That is because of my belief that populist democracies are undemocratic, and that the elites and the masses have ceased to be the people we thought they were. To some, my vision of society may appear upside down. Naturally I would suggest that it is they who, by failing to adjust their perceptions as reality reshapes itself around them, find themselves standing on their heads.

For all its vaunted liberties, Britain remains a country of cliques and convention: we are free to say what we like, but if anyone is to listen what we say must fall within the confines of the game. What will not be tolerated is criticism of the game itself, or suggestions that there may be other, more interesting games to be played. One response to this soft totalitarianism of opinion is silence: as Wittgenstein almost said, whereof one cannot speak rationally and be understood it is better not to speak at all. Another is to argue one’s case regardless, which is what this book attempts to do.

lts departures from accepted norms of democratic ingratiation will of course be condemned as elitist in themselves. In our antiquated up/down, Left/Right thinking, so it goes. All I can say is that, if you can’t please everyone, all the more reason to describe things as you see them, even if it pleases no one. There is at least one accusation I shall be spared: a book whose intention is to expose the depredations of populism cannot be accused of angling for popularity.

In Search of the Elites

‘The future belongs to crowds.’

Don DeLillo

‘Elitism’, the woman rapped out over dinner, ‘is a bad word.’

‘Absolutely,’ echoed her partner.

They were an echoing couple.

A moment before the woman had been affable, relaxed; now she seemed seized by fervour. The natural thing would have been to deflect the conversation with some light remark, but in the wake of her malediction light remarks—easily mistaken for elitist irony—were out of order. There was an instant’s silence. It was as if grace had been said and the company felt it should cross itself and murmur ‘The Lord protect us’ before falling back to its food.

The woman’s pronunciamento seemed at variance with her persona. She was expensively dressed, self-assured, a figure of authority. Her partner exuded the same confident worldliness. Also, the observation seemed in conflict with her surroundings: the dinner was in an exclusive club, where the two of them seemed at ease. When someone spoke it was to ask what elite meant today. The woman fell to thinking. How would I define it myself, I reflected, and came up with a blank. I waited for someone to quote Matthew Arnold—‘the best that is known and thought in the world’—determined that on no account would it be me. It was an inadequate definition at the best of times, and this was the worst. I could imagine the come-back all too easily:

‘Best? It depends what you mean.’

‘Well, something that’s better than anything else.’

‘Who’s to say?’

‘Well, someone has to say…’

‘You mean some people are intrinsically superior to others?’ ‘That’s not what I said…’

Later (it is always later) I remembered a passage in Saul Bellow’s novella The Bellarosa Connection:

As for Sorella, she was a woman with great powers of intelligence, and in these democratic times, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are continually in quest of higher types. I don’t have to draw you maps and pictures. Everyone knows what standard products and interchangeable parts signify, understands the operation of the glaciers on the social landscape, planing off the hills, scrubbing away the irregularities. I’m not going to be tedious about this.

Higher types? Lucky I hadn’t remembered.

The exclusive club served superb wines. The company was in relaxed mood, and showed no enthusiasm for a row. No one offering a definition of elitism, or presuming to defend the indefensible, the conversation moved on in that hurried, self-conscious way it does when subjects of such worrying topicality arise that people will do anything rather than follow them up. The British react to the subject of elitism as their Victorian ancestors did to sex; it troubles them deeply for reasons they would prefer not to think about, their consciences are not quite as clean as they would like, so they opt for a prudish reserve. For me our collective silence had settled the point. That brief, edgy exchange had confirmed three things in my mind: that elitism is at the centre of our social and cultural debate, that all righteous people are against it—and that no one can say with any certainty exactly what it is.

This seems something of an omission since, whatever it is, a movement seems underway to extirpate it from society. The Government condemns it, the BBC are fervently against it, the media despise it, writers and artists go to great lengths to disclaim it, the schools inoculate children against it as they once did smallpox or diphtheria. Yet few stop to ask what the idea means in twenty-first-century Britain. In mass democracies, where the offence of elitism is concerned, condemnation and sentencing take precedence over definition, let alone proof.

Politicians have long since learned to watch their language. ‘I look forward to a world that will not only be safe for democracy and diversity,’ said President Kennedy thirty-two years ago, ‘but also for distinction.’ Presidential speech-writers would erase that last phrase today. The sentence would stop at ‘diversity’, with its mellifluous vagueness and suggestion of the horizontal rather than the vertical. Which would be undemocratic, since it is hard to see ordinary folk taking offence at the idea that a little distinction was a desirable aim for all. The whole point of America is that anyone can become its distinguished President.

The