Snobs, Swots and Hacks

When we think​ of the fashions of the 1890s, several objects come to mind: the tennis racquet, the golfing cap, the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original Who’s Who of 1849 consisted of lists: members of the royal household, the House of Lords and House of Commons, as well as judges, archbishops and ambassadors. Its new publishers had the bright idea of supplementing this dry fare with more than five thousand biographical entries coaxed out of famous people. The new dictionary was designed to appeal to popular snobbery, patriotism and prurience. Its broadened coverage reflected the landed aristocracy’s surrender of social leadership to a bigger class combining money and property: wealthy arrivistes were lapping up the baronetcies and knighthoods awarded in profusion by cynical Tory politicians. The ambitious late Victorian man could aspire to a satisfying variety of professions and an expanded range of dining clubs. And within five years, the Order of Merit and the British Academy would be created to pander to a hunger among the meritorious to be recognised and ranked. Who’s Who sought to humanise these people by asking them how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.

Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon office, or the result of ability which singles them out from their fellows in occupations open to every educated man or woman’. Peers and baronets still qualify by right. Half of the entries (there are around 32,500) select themselves through the attainment of particular distinctions: MPs, KCs, senior diplomats, dames and knights, university vice-chancellors, national newspaper editors, FRSs and FBAs. The rest are determined by criteria not made public. A few professions, such as my own, have become too commonplace to matter: Oxbridge professors stopped being listed automatically about twenty years ago.

In 2016, two sociologists, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, began a study of the British elite founded on the 125,000 entries in the database of Who’s Who and its companion volume, Who Was Who. They supplemented this body of material with some interviews – new or archival – with individuals selected from different generations of entrants. Their book is best when charting changes in the profile of the database over time. It shows, for example, that those born in the 1920s recognised the importance of the old boy network in getting them started in their careers, whereas those from later generations went out of their way to stress the importance of qualifications.

Changing tastes in leisure activities are neatly summarised. More than 60 per cent of those born in the 1880s and 1890s boasted of pursuits that the authors present as ‘aristocratic’, falling to less than 40 per cent for those born in the 1940s and 1950s. (Since golf provides half of both these percentages, the fall is really greater, since by the postwar years it had far less cachet.) Conversely, 30 per cent of the older generation and between 60 and 70 per cent of the younger are classified as enjoying ‘highbrow’ pastimes, which apparently include music, reading and hiking as well as collecting antiques. Those admitted to Who’s Who in the last two decades are less likely to claim highbrow tastes, and more likely to list ‘everyday recreations’, such as friends, relationships and pets. The option of a more detailed analysis of sporting preferences has sadly been missed.

The authors’ central boast is that the Who’s Who database contains the 125,000 people who have ‘shaped Britain’ since 1900. This is their ‘elite’, and they argue that there has been an alarming lack of change in its composition. Our rulers are still drawn disproportionately from the nine major public schools (as defined by the Clarendon Commission report of 1864) and Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of Who’s Who entrants born in the years before 1880 attended these schools, and the figure is still around 10 per cent for those born between 1945 and 1980. Between 40 and 50 per cent of those joining the cohort in the years 2001-22 were privately educated. The proportion who attended Oxford and Cambridge has remained more or less consistent, between 30 and 40 per cent, for all cohorts born between 1830 and 1980. Throughout the 20th century, more than 20 per cent of entrants had parents whose wealth at death put them in the top 1 per cent, measured by probate records (available online up to 1995). Reeves and Friedman call for ‘urgent political attention’ to redress these patterns of elite reproduction.

As some of these dates suggest, the analysis is not as current as the authors imply. No one is ever removed from Who’s Who, and people are a long time a-dying. Most of the professional distinctions that confer automatic entry tend to be gained after the age of fifty – life peerages, silk, fellowships of the British Academy. The latest edition of Who’s Who contains entries for a composite of generations reaching back several decades. Most of those who appear in it were at school and university between thirty and fifty years ago. Even if we accept that this body of people constitutes ‘today’s elite’, they were not formed by today’s educational environment. We cannot assume that our current social arrangements will produce a similar outcome in thirty years’ time. It is too early for the book to reflect the impact of the revolution in hiring practices over the last two decades. Equality, diversity and inclusion processes have been more effective in some fields than others. To the extent that it was ever possible to talk of a socially uniform elite, it must now be more difficult.

Much of Who’s Who seems more relevant to 1897 than the modern world. Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small fish even in the small pond that is British snuff manufacture, though he has another claim to fame: between 2000 and 2003 he appeared with Clarissa Dickson Wright in a BBC series about country life. Reeves and Friedman’s analysis of educational background should have been rerun after removing those with hereditary titles, in order to gauge how far private schools dominate other categories included in Who’s Who. Only one baronetcy has been awarded since 1964. Sir Mark Thatcher (Harrow) is firmly in place, though he tells us nothing about his occupation or interests.

Who’s Who still sets store by the attainment of particular badges of distinction in the traditional professions – the universities, the bar, the diplomatic service. It’s not surprising that people who as undergraduates did well in examinations at Oxbridge and the colleges that make up the University of London should go on to collect a disproportionate number of these badges. The high-achieving type who is driven to work for a first-class degree usually remains driven to attain a KC and similar career prizes. As Born to Rule shows, there was a cultural change among Oxbridge students in the 1950s and 1960s. Members of the ‘elite’ who attended these universities in the interwar period didn’t think they needed to work hard there in order to get a good job. Almost none of the interview sample born after 1940 said the same. They all noted the need to perform well in exams. An ‘elite destination was no longer guaranteed’, because competition for entry was much fiercer. In 1965, 27 per cent of students admitted to Oxford had top A level grades in at least two subjects. Twenty years later, 82 per cent had top grades in at least three.

The selection panel for Who’s Who clearly struggles to handle walks of life in which ‘distinction’ is less easily measurable. It does not seem systematically interested even in the partners of the major commercial solicitors. It certainly has not found a way of embracing most of those who have clout in modern high finance – few of whom would want to appear in the volume anyway. For instance, there’s no entry for Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager, serial philanthropist, investor in GB News and proprietor of the Spectator. Fewer than 5 per cent of Who’s Who entrants born in the 1970s are in ‘business’. CEOs of FTSE100 companies are invited to submit an entry, but one looks in vain for the chief executives or major investor-directors of the biggest Premier League football clubs. Vinai Venkatesham, CEO of Arsenal until last year, isn’t included (though this may change now he has an OBE), nor is the club’s American owner. There was, however, an entry for the late Sir Chips Keswick, a former club chairman, educated at Eton, son-in-law of the earl of Dalhousie and a director of the Bank of England. Sometimes Who’s Who seems determined to parody itself.

Born to Rule’s other major problem is that it runs together two very different definitions of an elite. Its research methods suggest a traditional vision, based on a graded hierarchy of rank and distinction. However, its later chapters and concluding recommendations assume a more antagonistic idea of the elite as a privileged few with advantages of power and influence denied to the many. In these parts of the book, the authors concentrate on the ‘wealth elite’. Most of the 6000 people in this subsection of the Who’s Who database have parents whose probate records placed them in the top 1 per cent of national wealth. Reeves and Friedman’s charge is that these people are ‘able to deploy their wealth to accentuate their influence and power’. They may claim to have succeeded through merit, but this is a smokescreen shielding ‘the most influential individuals … from public scrutiny’.

The problem is that the authors present very little evidence that this wealth elite has either unity or power. The rich undoubtedly have serious advantages in modern Britain. (The Sutton Trust has produced several useful discussions of the problem.) Unpaid internships still exist in some fields, and low starting pay in many arts jobs gives advantages to those with wealth and connections. It is very difficult to get anywhere in precarious types of employment – including most of the arts – without parental financial help. The asset bubble of the last 25 years has greatly benefited families with investments, while at the same time inflating housing costs to levels that most young people struggle with.

The book shows that many of the families which maintain their status in the wealth elite over decades can rely not just on one generation of financial support but on two. Rich grandparents are as useful as rich parents. This is hardly news – there are few societies in human history in which family networks have not exerted themselves to support one another and prop up the family’s status. The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu, along with their own interviews, to demonstrate that a financially secure upbringing can encourage children to take investment risks, knowing that there is a security blanket if things go wrong. Again, we know this already. It seems that few weekends go by without a newspaper featuring an interview with a successful entrepreneur with a public-school education and a charmingly self-deprecating manner who has built a niche business purveying high-end furniture, posh chocolate or some other reassuringly expensive indicator of taste.

The authors assume that this wealth elite has ‘real power’ because it combines ‘positional power and economic power’. But measuring this power requires more nuance than they can muster. In order to test the way ‘the class background and upbringing of elites may affect their decision-making’, they look at one example: the judgments made by the UK Supreme Court since it was established in 2009. They divide these into two: the 40 per cent of cases in which at least one of the judges had a parent in the wealth elite, and the rest. The percentage of ‘left-wing’ outcomes (typically a case when a public authority wins over a company) in the former group was 48 per cent as against 59 per cent. Since five judges normally sit, and since the measurement is so crude, this is a baffling basis for a theory. The Supreme Court’s recent caution over its constitutional role has left it open to the charge of indifference to specific cases of oppression, as Conor Gearty showed in the LRB of 27 January 2022. But that is a different matter from arguing that judges have a crude bias in favour of protecting the interests of the rich.

The argument that the wealth elite have an ‘outsized ability to further their political agenda’ is buttressed by only a handful of interviews, with people who were able to retire early and take up voluntary positions. Hugh – all participants are given new names – became chairman of a university and hoped to use this position to support academic freedom of speech. Amanda’s charitable work for artistic bodies allowed her to meet decision-makers and lobby them to support state funding of the arts. It’s hardly news that voluntary bodies want to recruit wealthy people as trustees. But even Amanda’s eloquence has not persuaded the state to scatter much money over museums and galleries. Meanwhile the campaign for legislation to protect academic freedom of speech was rejected by the incoming Labour government.

Neither probate data nor Who’s Who itself is likely to reveal who uses their wealth to best political effect. Many wealthy families should have been able to maintain or improve their financial position in the generally very benign investment and political climate that has existed since the 1980s. But ‘new wealth’ – the wealth of the private equity firms, hedge funds and corporate banks, especially international ones – has had a much more obvious effect on Britain, not least as a result of the outsourcing of much social provision to private equity companies. More than twenty investment companies now have stakes in children’s care homes, and eight of the ten largest private providers have private equity backing. They load up on debt while threatening to withdraw to more congenial jurisdictions if their tax burden is increased.

No doubt, some individuals have always pulled levers behind the scenes to benefit themselves and their families financially. But the authors have no evidence that the inheritors of old wealth can still act effectively as a class. Their claim that ‘different forms of power often reinforce each other’ is supported by one example – the self-made businessman Michael Ashcroft (state grammar and Mid-Essex Technical College). ‘His wealth accentuates his political influence, and his political influence accentuates the power of his wealth.’ Ashcroft’s pursuit of influence has been eye-catching, partly because it has been unusually varied – it’s difficult to think of anyone quite so energetic and relentless in his campaigning – and partly because it is quixotically blatant and opinionated. A man who wanted everyone to think that Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, was a dysfunctional presence in Number 10, and that David Cameron had performed a sex act on a pig, can be said to be many things, but a secretive wirepuller is not one of them.

Reeves and Friedman​ allege that the wealth elite ‘tilts strongly to the right’. The comparison is with the rest of their Who’s Who database, and is hardly surprising. In fact the wider database is very diverse politically. On the basis of questionnaire returns from current entrants, the authors identify three groups – one on the right, a New Labour group and a more progressive left-wing one. The right is a minority in all cohorts and represented by barely 20 per cent of those born in the 1960s and 1970s. In the wealth elite it is stronger but still only 37 per cent of the whole. The Oxbridge graduates tilt to the left politically and culturally.

Born to Rule does not display any sensitivity to the details of the political process or the nature of the modern political class. Reeves and Friedman assume that Whitehall and Westminster are run by wealthy wirepullers who operate on MPs, peers and elite civil servants. In fact, modern political parties are cadres in which officials, special advisers, friendly think tanks and pollsters largely determine what goes into manifestos and which issues are prioritised in government. Yet few of these people feature in Who’s Who. The difficulty in analysing power is that there are so many different types. In 1880, after being prime minister for nearly seven years, Benjamin Disraeli used his last novel to observe that ‘the most powerful men are not public men … A public man is responsible, and a responsible man is a slave … The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.’

All institutions are fronted by representational figures, who are supported by backroom operators. Since Who’s Who is organised around specific measures of distinction, it features the first group much more than the second. Public-facing institutions need prestigious individuals to act as ambassadors, and to bear the strain of public scrutiny. These are demanding jobs, which confer power of a sort – the power to influence a public narrative about an institution, to bring individuals together to constructive ends, to obstruct or prioritise particular issues. But they mostly involve patient and emollient negotiation between fractious individuals. Continuous power over policy is usually delegated to the backroom. No one would try to include in Who’s Who the people who really shape such institutions, and most of these people wouldn’t be interested in life as an ambassadorial figurehead.

In the LRB of 24 February 1994 P.N. Furbank criticised sociologists for not understanding that class was a matter of rhetoric (‘the proper way to study [it] is by introspection: by prolonged reflection on what is going on in oneself when one thinks “class” thoughts – a most devious and complex business, full of ruses and logical paradoxes’). If you want to be defined as a member of an elite, you need to obtain certain jobs, which will help you to attain certain honours and prizes. Many people don’t want to do this. The whole notion of professional distinction seems old-fashioned. In the academic world, on the arts side at least, so much is published in such a variety of formats that most measurements of prestige have lost their standing. The ‘gold standard’ series of doorstopper books that the major university presses used to publish have been marginalised by snappier accounts. Some learned societies need as many subscription-paying members as possible. Others, terrified of being seen as pale, male and stale, focus their selection efforts on a belated makeover.

Do young people still aspire to join elites? In the last 32 years I have known hundreds of Cambridge history students. Almost none has wanted to be an MP. Some who are keen on public service have aimed at the Treasury, but not with a view to achieving a gong. Many others hope to work for international or charitable bodies. Those who want a steady and profitable profession become City solicitors or accountants. A few are drawn to startups. A large number try to earn a living as journalists, writers, artists or historians, or as policy wonks. Very few of them (and very few of the larger group of applicants from whom they were selected) attended the nine major public schools. They can’t be reduced to a sociological unit, but many came from high-achieving state schools and the book-respecting university-educated professional classes – what one might call the LRB-reading classes.

This book’s attempt to portray Britain as still in the clammy grip of toffs badly misfires. In reality, Britain’s four quasi-elites – of birth, of wealth, of exam swotting and of political hackery – are more dissimilar than they have ever been.