What should really worry them, however, is the class war — because, like or not, the Tories still have a problem with poshness. 

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In defence of working-class conservatism

By Peter Franklin

It might not seem that way. With the party winning seats like Workington and Blyth Valley one could argue that the whole “Tory toff” thing doesn’t matter anymore. At the last election, the Conservatives not only got more support than Labour did from low income voters, they also got more support from low income voters than they did from high income voters.

However, that’s precisely why the party should be worried. When a crucial part of your electoral coalition isn’t accustomed to voting for you, that’s cause to be extra careful about the things that always put them off you in the past. The Conservatives remain vulnerable to the lingering suspicion that they’re a party of the upper class, for the upper class.

If you want an example of that, cast your mind back to May and the two weeks’ hate directed at Dominic Cummings. The level of fury went well beyond the usual Twitter pile-on — and well beyond the population of diehard Remainers desperate for revenge. Nor was this a simple case of someone in power hypocritically breaking the rules — indeed, no rule-breaking was ever proven.

As was laboriously explained, the Cummings family had driven from London to County Durham so they could self-isolate on a country estate in an empty cottage away from the main house — thus the lockdown restrictions were fully observed. But it wasn’t the technicalities the public paid attention to, what registered were words like “country estate”, “empty cottage” and “main house”. It may have been more of a farm than an estate and the cottage far from luxurious, but the damage was done. Once again, the Tories were seen as living in a different world.

Then last month another example came along. The “rule of six” was hard enough to swallow, but the news that grouse shooting had been exempted left a bitter aftertaste. It was, of course, part of a much wider exemption for organised outdoor activities, but the nexus between wealth, land ownership and blood sports is pure poison for the Tories.

Just look what happened in the 2017 general election when a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls was all but wiped out. That collapse didn’t start with the botched manifesto launch, but earlier in the campaign when Theresa May declared her support for a vote on repealing the law on fox hunting. This went down like a lead balloon — or a pheasant full of shot.

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Jack Hutchison

You’d think by now that the Conservative Party would understand that the whole killing-animals-for-sport thing does not play well for them. When he was Prime Minister, Tony Blair understood it very well — which is why he spared so much Parliamentary time to the ban on hunting with hounds. It was hardly the highest animal welfare priority, but it got the Tories just where Blair wanted them. In his era-defining speech to the 1999 Labour Party conference, he described his opponents as “the party of fox hunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers” — and that was them stitched-up for the next two elections.

Like I’ve said before, nothing says “same old Tories” like posh people riding off to kill something. But why is this image so potent? What vein of public disquiet was Blair tapping into? The politics of envy? Reverse snobbery? Ill-informed urban sentiment about country life? Maybe. But the man on a horse evokes something much darker — an atavistic fear instilled by millennia of violence and oppression.

To understand just how deep all of this stuff goes, we need to go back to the very dawn of history — and a crucial development that shaped the world we live in today.

I’m referring to a phenomenon that concerns the languages we speak and how they relate to one another. The English language, for instance, is part of larger group of Germanic tongues (e.g. German, Dutch, Swedish etc). In turn, this Teutonic branch is part of a yet bigger family — the Indo-European languages. As the name suggests, it includes just about all the European languages, and many from the Indian sub-continent too (plus various places in between). It’s an incredible thought, but Welsh, English, Spanish, Russian, Lithuanian, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Farsi, Urdu and Bengali are all descended from a common root.

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Francis Young

We don’t know for sure who spoke this ancestral tongue (which linguists call Proto-Indo-European or PIE), but somehow they and their descendants spread it across a vast area — as a result of which most of the indigenous languages went extinct. The Basque language is one of the few surviving fragments of the linguistic diversity that must have once existed in Europe. So what happened? How did those PIE-speakers sweep all before them? 

The most widely-held theory is that their original homeland was somewhere in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. These were people of the steppe and the secret of their success was that they domesticated the horse. As a result they acquired superpowers: the ability to travel across distances and strike with a force that other peoples couldn’t hope to match. In all likelihood , they became conquerors — and when one ruling class replaces another, the language often changes too. 

The terrifying power of the mounted warrior may also be the origin of the centaur myth. To people who have never seen horses, or at least never learned to ride them, the sight of man and beast moving together as one suggests a monstrous hybrid of the two. In ancient Greek culture, the centaur was the personification of chaos — of the barbarian charging out of the wilderness.

Horsemanship doesn’t just confer speed and strength, but also height. It literally separates those on top from those below. Away from the battlefield, the man on a horse is a symbol of the class system. In this respect, the connection to hunting for sport is especially potent. 

Once upon a time, we were all hunter-gatherers. But then came farming, which allowed our numbers to grow. Or maybe it was our growing numbers that required us to start farming. Either way, game became scarce and was monopolised by the ruling class. They ate meat; we ate grass. They remained hunters; we became poachers. 

And this, I think, is our real problem with “country sports” and all the class associations that go with it. Contemporary concerns over animal welfare are a thin veneer over something much, much older — a cultural memory of subjugation. When the Countryside Alliance and other groups campaigned to save hunting, they implored the public to consider just how much hunting means to some rural communities. The reason why this failed is not because these practices have no meaning to the rest of the population, but because they still do.

The so-called “High Tories” really ought to understand this stuff. They’re the ones always going on about custom and tradition: the inherited intuitions that link the present to the past. And, they’re right — these things are real and they matter. But they matter to everyone — the descendants of downtrodden peasants, not just the men on horses.

Hunting is not the only signifier of poshness; schooling is a big part of it too. The exclusivity of an expensive private education obviously leaves the state educated majority on the outside, but that’s not all — there’s also the bit about people sending their children away. Hogwarts not withstanding, the idea of boarding school is one that horrifies most of us muggles. In our increasingly diverse society, we’ve become attuned to cultural differences — but is there a bigger cultural difference than this one? I mean, if personal circumstances don’t force you to, then why on earth would you send your kids to live somewhere else? And not even to a family home!

But perhaps family is the point — the creation of a superfamily. From time-to-time, human societies have aimed to create in-group solidarity through the collective rearing of children. The Shakers in America, for instance, or the Kibbutzim in Israel. The ultimate example, however, was ancient Sparta, where boys were taken away from their mothers at the age of seven and raised in military barracks. In its own brutal fashion, it worked. Spartan society was so effectively militarised and unified that they held off the Persians, defeated the Athenians and controlled a local slave population — the helots — that was many times bigger than their own. I’m not making a direct comparison between Sparta’s nightmare society and our own dear toffs, but there are… echoes. 

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History began with a counterfactual

By Tom Holland

As a rite of passage, young Spartan men were encouraged to steal from, attack and even murder the helots. This wasn’t just a test of military prowess, it was a means of dominating the subject population through state-sanctioned terror. It’s a tactic that ruling classes have used at many points in the past — to intimidate other people and to initiate their own.

Again, this isn’t something we’ve entirely forgotten. When we hear tales of anti-social behaviour on the part of exclusive drinking clubs at elite universities we don’t just write it off as the normal student rowdiness. The spectacle of privileged young men throwing their weight around — and their money — provokes a visceral loathing that goes much deeper than the mere politics of envy. 

Collectively, we remember. 

When he became Conservative leader, David Cameron tried to detoxify the Tory brand. It was out with the “nasty party” and in with “hug-a-husky”. “Banging on about Europe” was replaced with the “Big Society”. But in conflating the nastiness of the nasty party with cultural conservatism, he’d forgotten all about class. That photograph of him in his student days posing with fellow members of the Bullingdon Club did lasting damage. Though comparable to Blair at the height of his popularity, at no point did the electorate ever take Cameron to heart — he was never the people’s Prime Minister, nor could he be. 

Looking back, through such instruments as the Sasha Swire diaries, we can see him continually surrounded by a coterie of his own class. His closest advisors, his social circle, were of a type — not the tweedy, LARPing Rees-Mogg variety — but nevertheless out-of-touch, no matter how modernised they considered themselves to be. He, and they, would discover the real modern Britain on the 23 June 2016, but by then it was too late.

When Theresa May took over, she was described by Westminster insiders as “unclubbable”, but to the voters that was a blessed relief. Unfortunately, and as mentioned above, she too failed to understand the Tory problem with class; but at least she wasn’t part of it. Never forget that she pushed the Conservative vote share way above what Cameron ever achieved.

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Stop making poverty the butt of jokes

By Gavanndra Hodge

May pioneered the strategy that Boris Johnson perfected, but that brings me to the apparent Achilles’ Heel of my entire argument. How can I say that poshness is problem for the Tories given the result of 2019? Is Boris not poshness personified? Does he not appear in that very same photograph as David Cameron? Has he made the slightest attempt to downplay his class identity?

Well, the answers are obvious, but Boris is to poshness what a pantomime dame is to femininity — an absurd performance put on for the public’s enjoyment. Of course, while Widow Twankey is not actually a woman, Boris Johnson is actually posh. Crucially, though, he very publicly abandoned his own tribe by breaking with Cameron over Brexit and siding with the 52%. 

It also helped that so many prominent Remainers became the new snobs, condescending to Leave voters and insulting them with accusations of ignorance and bigotry. Worse still, they went all out to overturn the referendum result. At each stage of the ensuing battle, it was Boris Johnson who stood in their way, while also taking his share of the flak. In defying the Remain establishment, he stuck by Brexit Britain and so Brexit Britain stuck by him.

But what next? Though hardly irrelevant, Brexit is now just one element in the multiple challenges we face as a nation. As for the Boris persona, that joke’s wearing a little thin — and so, perhaps, is he.

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Has 'Long Covid' left us leaderless?

By Mary Harrington

The extraordinary confluence of circumstance and personality that allowed the Tories to prevail is unravelling. So where does that leave them?

With a Cabinet, most of whom were privately educated. With an economic policy that still favours the rentier class. With a looming jobs crisis that will hit the poorest workers hardest. With a skills deficit That is still unsolved; a housing crisis that is still unaddressed; and a culture war that is still unfought. And though the “levelling-up” agenda is promising, it is still as under-resourced as George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse.

And, so, as the utility of Boris and Brexit fade-away, the Tories still have everything to prove.

Not so long ago I was chatting to an urbane young businessman at a London party: after a few minutes he raised his eyebrows and asked: “And… you went to school?” It took a second before I realised he wasn’t questioning whether I had had any formal education, but using the old code Etonians employ when referring to their College.

It is a masonic handshake, but so very much more exclusive. It is a nod to understood values along with a wry acknowledgement of the self-regarding uniqueness of the place. These codes, the jokes and their understanding are a small but not insignificant part of the package for which my parents, and my grandparents, and several generations before them, paid all that money.

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Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

For a long time I told myself that a few years at Eton hadn’t meant very much to my life. After all, it was not a long stint – as I made clear to that smooth OE (old Etonian) and do to anyone else who brings it up – I was ejected after less than three years, at 16 (for smoking, drinking and suspected homosexual tendencies beyond the norm).

I was quite proud then that Eton’s quality control system had found me wanting; I was pretty sure I didn’t want any more of what the school offered and I was not unaware of the hallowed line of Eton rejects and rebels for whom life turned out interestingly. In the time of The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ being expelled from Eton was pretty cool.

But I realise now that I am indelibly marked by the place, as I am by the values and rules of the class that used it. It’s like a tattoo you got on a drunken night long ago and which peeks out from your sleeve to embarrass. It’s not that it helped fast-track me to university, or into a top job. I spent my 20s and 30s working in Left-wing theatre and then centre-Leftish journalism, and while hardly meritocratic, being an old or ex-Etonian wasn’t an obvious advantage in those fields. Not as much as was being white, male and privileged.

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Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

Privilege is a difficult concept – a word thrown around to the extent of losing much usefulness. But it is of enormous importance when you weigh up class and Britain today. It means more than entitlement: it is the ownership of a range of tools that, as any self-help book will tell you, are useful for a traditionally successful life. Self-confidence, self-belief, persuasiveness, and what used to be called ‘clubbability’.

I know an old Etonian who makes part of his living touring private schools giving lectures to the pupils on “charm” and how it gets you everything – headmasters’ wives love him.

Privilege gets many unquantifiable things that can turn out to be of enormous value: an understanding of how clubs and networks function, connections, a stamp of acceptability based on unspoken shared beliefs.

It is a freemasonry, and membership translates into jobs, wealth and power: it’s no wonder that the proportions of judges and senior lawyers, of armed forces top brass, of politicians and senior business leaders who were privately educated today is pretty much what it was 50 years ago. It works – a place at Eton for your son is not a bad bet, if you can afford it. The prizes are huge, and the odds on getting them still pretty favourable.

Politicians, both Left and Right, have attempted to address the gross inequality the system clearly perpetuates ever since Churchill encouraged Rab Butler to democratise the public schools during the war (see David Kynaston and Francis Green’s recent Engines of Privilege: the British Private School Problem for a fascinating history of this political failure).

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Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

Yet while the products of public schools have always been among the institutions’ worst enemies, the institutions themselves have proved remarkably resilient. It is born of an inherent flexibility, the quality that has kept my class in power in Britain for so many centuries. You can come in, if you’ve got the money, or the brains, or the looks. It worked and still does: if it did not, the British would surely have risen and torn down those spires long ago.

There are two things around today that might challenge this long-fossilised situation. The first is financial. Eton – and everywhere like it – is very, very expensive today. It always was: 70 years ago the annual fee was “about the same as a Rolls-Royce, or keeping a mistress in Maida Vale,” as an old joke has it. But when my parents sent me there in 1974 the basic charge was £861, the equivalent of £9000 today. In 2019, a year at the school costs nearer £42,000, before extras.

Even at a private day school, the average is £15,000. Across the boarding sector fees are up 50% in 10 years. Sums like these can only hurt the traditional public-school customer base, the squirearchy and the professions. Can Etons populated solely by the children of the super-rich and a few scholarship-holders survive the political clamour to remove the tax-breaks and the schools’ (indefensible) status as charities?

My other thought is more speculative. I wonder if the Eton brand is now gravely tarnished. Many charges are commonly laid against Etonians and their class – arrogance, greed, callousness, and that’s just to start – but I think their fatal flaw might be an inherent lack of seriousness. “We are often told that they taught us nothing at Eton. That may be so, but I think they taught it very well.” said General Herbert Plumer – one of the “donkey” leaders of the first world war – when addressing an Old Etonians’ dinner in 1916.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

I think of Plumer when I read Boris Johnson at his bombastic heights. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really mean it. Etonian humour is a lovely thing – there’s a strong tendency to self-deprecation that seems very healthy – but it may also cover up many failings. Particularly when coupled with the abiding sense that the destiny, by right, of a young man leaving the school is to go out and make the world a better place.

The system seems – dangerously – to produce people who look like leaders, talk like leaders, but don’t lead very well at all. It is an old charge, but the list of failed Etonians is long today. At its top is David Cameron, the amiable schoolboy who liked a game of poker, and went on to take unforgivable gambles with Britain’s future, the price of which we are all now paying.

Your reaction to all this may well depend on where you went to school, or indeed if you went to “school”. But let me leave you this, from Alec Waugh. His account of Sherborne, The Loom of Youth, was published in 1919, to outrage at what now seem the tamest scenes of homosexual yearning. But it is the teenage Waugh’s savage assault on the public-school class and its hypocrisies that is more interesting. And yet, like most ex-public school boys, Waugh is, ultimately, ironic and ambivalent:

“He is selfish, easy-going, pleasure-loving, absolutely without a conscience. But he is a jolly good companion and the Freemasonry of a Public School is amazing. No man who has been through a good Public School is an outsider. He may hang around the Empire bar, he may cheat at business; but you may be certain of one thing, he will never let you down. Very few Public School men ever do a mean thing to their friends. And for a system which produces such a spirit as this there is much to be said after all.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?