Britain is a nation of flunkies Loveable toffs stifle progress

Hereditary privilege has, mercifully, lost much of its cachet. Yet the zombie refuses to rest in its grave. Costume dramas and bodice-rippers about dukes and dowagers continue to pour forth; queues of deferential tourists lengthen outside stately homes; and royal gossip still clutters our feuilletons and opinion pages.

From Downton to Bridgerton to Saltburn, aristos continue to hog our screens, big and small. But as a class they have been in visible decline. The Whigs — those original wokes — delivered the early blows, repealing the Corn Laws and widening the franchise. Then came the fin-de-siècle pounding: Harcourt’s death duties of 1894, which were the first serious taxes on the rich; by 1946, they had reached a respectable 75%.

The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed à la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks.

By the Seventies, their kind were truly on the back foot. The V&A’s doleful 1974 exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House”, invited the public to mourn the plight of the poor aristos. It opened in December, just two months after miners had kicked out Edward Heath, the only instance in postwar European history where working-class muscle toppled a ruling party.

To be sure, there were holdouts. American nouveaux riches came galloping to the rescue of cash-strapped British anciens pauvres through canny marriages. The aristocracy itself was padded out with parvenus: the infamous “beerage” of nouveau peers who had merely brewed enough pints or befriended the PM to warrant their elevation.

Some piles these days host festivals. Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, for instance, was until recently the unlikely home of the psychedelic trance festival Noisily. Then we have the aristocratic rhotacists who stwuggle with their Rs flogging themselves on YouTube, the likes of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who scrape a living from posting lifestyle videos for the gawping pleasure of the lower orders.

The contemporary trend is less marriage than outright sale. Highland acres have been snapped up wholesale by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish fashion billionaire who is now Scotland’s largest private landowner. Meanwhile a great many native landlords, far from being wellie-wearing custodians of tradition, have abandoned their home. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, sniggered at English girls as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne” before decamping to France for a dissipated life. Many of his peers now live off private wealth management funds on the Riviera.

But for most aristos, the decline has been grim. Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, a modern history of the aristocracy, is a surprisingly candid and stylish peek into that well-heeled world; surprising because her acknowledgements brim with such reassuringly posh names as Lady Celestria Hales, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Thomas van Straubenzee, not to mention her throwaway reassurance that she has one foot firmly anchored in the clubs of St James’s. Still, she lapses into a certain breathlessness at times, succumbing to titular gewgaws: “Though we are friends on Facebook, I cannot help but always call him Lord Derby.” But then, this is the sort of book where Stuart Hall denotes not the founder of the New Left Review but a country pile of that name in County Tyrone.

Doughty parades before us the symptoms of decline: braces of yachts sold, Van Dyck rooms denuded of Van Dycks, visiting grandees of yore replaced by wide-eyed day-trippers with lanyards. One architectural historian noted a Lazarus-like lady of the house who, unable to afford maids, “exuded a sour smell of unwashed clothes” — a mephitic reversal of the old order, where aristocrats wrinkled their noses at the poor.

Worse than the stench, it seems, is their boorishness. Freed from pecuniary cares, one might have expected these families to take up learning or cultivate a little sprezzatura. Instead, they plodded into finance, ignorant of their own collections. Henry Somerset, showing guests his Canalettos, could only remark they were “very like the house”. The decimation of foxes was the only pursuit that quickened his pulse.

The decline in servants worsened things. The half century on either side of the First World War coincided with rising wages. Thousands of footmen and scullery maids took city jobs, leaving aristocrats to fend for themselves. Suddenly Job was less the Old Testament character than a métier one might be forced into. The Earl of Arundel became an insurance salesman after a stint as a Formula 3 driver, Baron Milne a chair-caner, Baron Kenilworth a horticulturist, and the son of the second Viscount Monckton — what else? — a monk. Baron Teviot found a job behind the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s before becoming a bus driver. Baron Feversham, for his sins, made porn flicks.

Contact with commoners no doubt proved salutary for these men. For, by and large, the non-working aristocracy has remained insulated from shifts in social attitudes. Indeed, they have effectively sat out the 20th century as if in a time-warp, clinging to arch-conservatism even as the lower orders have embraced progressive ideas. It is no accident, then, that the Lords has always lagged a generation behind the Commons. Women peers only arrived in 1958, amid spluttering opposition from the 28-year-old Earl Ferrers, who moaned: “Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to ‘the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor?’ I find that a horrifying thought.”

On divorce, too, they trailed behind popular sentiment, sneering long after the rest of the country had stopped caring. There were, it is true, emancipated outliers. Mollie Buccleuch, known as “Midnight Moll”, maintained a sprightly reputation for seduction well into senescence. The 7th Marquess of Bath lived as a polyamorist with 74 “wifelets” while remaining married. But such figures were the exception, not the rule.

Throughout the 20th century, many made a show of ordinariness — roast beef on Sundays, cottage pie on Mondays — in stabs of working-class cosplay that conveniently ignored their own preference for endogamy. Eton in the Seventies could still field classes with two earls and a viscount; another student recalled classmates named Guinness, Charrington, Whitbread, and Worthington: “it made me drunk just to look at them.”

To be fair, there were aristos like Tony Benn, who disclaimed his title, and the red toff Wogan Philipps, the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to sit in the Lords. But such class traitors were rare. The majority clung to their exclusivity. At their most accommodating, the Bolshie levellers among them go no further than insisting their tenants address them by their Christian names.

Aristocratic decline has been good for us proles. Many of its ranks happily disposed of their white elephants to the National Trust, which has done noble work rescuing crumbling porticos and pergolas — though its deferential tone still grates on the average republican who visits such establishments for reasons of architectural interest rather than to admire aristocratic twee. Much of the art was absorbed by our national collections, with Kenneth Clark, the soi-disant socialist director of the National Gallery, astutely scooping up treasures for the people. Back in 1873, a land survey revealed that 710 people owned 80% of this isle. This vampiric monopoly, the statesman John Bright complained in 1871, had “divorced the English from the soil”. It is no bad thing that the monopoly was smashed, clearing space for hoi polloi. Home ownership increased from 10 to 70% in the 20th century.

And yet, for all the decline, the aristocracy persists. Doughty reminds us there are still 796 families with hereditary titles. They hold some 3.2 million acres — three-quarters the size of Wales — and remain, as the great political theorist Tom Nairn insisted, not so much a quaint relic as an active abetter of our “national backwardness”, impeding our progress toward a truly classless society. Even Ken Livingstone, that tribune of municipal socialism, Nairn lamented, was prone to going moist-eyed before the queen in his lime-green hat sporting wobbling baubles — making him resemble “some form of royal bird-scarer”, as The Times conjectured.

Pace Bagehot, Nairn argued, Britain is not a “disguised republic” with its real rulers the modernising commoners and the ancient nobodies merely for show. Republics are built upon equality among the orders. This has never been the case in Britain. As Nairn puts it: “No amount of fulmination about the immorality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: the aristocracy is an expression of mass conservatism… People enjoy the monarchical twaddle, and show very little sign of being robotised or brainwashed.” The upshot is continued deference to nobs. The sort of people who fly into a rage when a lumpenproletarian type jumps a Tube turnstile will in the same breath wax rhapsodic about Elizabeth Windsor: yes ma’am; thank you for your service; three bags full, ma’am.

This rings true. The British working classes have never despised the aristocrats as their continental counterparts did. Here, as in sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent, deference to bigwigs remains the default mode. Britain’s peculiar solidarity is inverted: high and low are united in despising the middle — with its associations of thrift and moderation, education and culture, museums and literature, its self-preening moral seriousness and pseudo-high-mindedness, dedication to an assortment of causes, disdain for such vices as whoring and heroin. As the working-class comedian Billy Connolly put it: “The serious upper class, the proper bigshots, they’re all nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts as well and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.”

It’s fun to épater la bourgeoisie, no doubt, but the worldview has consequences. Britain today suffers the highest homelessness rates in the Western world, the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and a public realm in visible decrepitude — draughty homes, leaky plumbing, collapsing trains, a health service on life support. We tolerate this partly because our culture still whispers that some are born to better things. The cult of the aristocracy, and its royal apex, supplies the nation with a pensée unique: a defence of hierarchy, inequality, and indeed decline.

With our love of twee, pomp, and ceremony, we are an anachronistic society, much like the fictional Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As Nairn puts it, we live in Ukania — a broken, fractured society held together only by the weak glue of monarchic attachment. Britain’s regions and nations are bound with a royal tint of Ruritanian nostalgia, its protocols and etiquette: misty-eyed guff about past glory, Second World War memorabilia, and endless “yes, ma’ams”. Nations are usually built on a sense of comradeship. Not so in Britain, where a surrogate nationalism has formed around the enchantments of the aristocracy and the Crown — around the “glamour of backwardness”. The Windsor-worshipping queues during Truss’s brief tenure made this plain. It is hard to escape the conclusion that our fascination with the aristocracy has reduced us to a nation of grovelling gimps.

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Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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