WE ARE DOING VERY WELL, THANK YOU

Adam Nicolson, old Etonian, reveals

the methods by which the upper classes maintain their exclusive status and benefits

Or is he? This is a subtle subject, the province of mirage and deceit. More than any other class of people the truly privileged know how to smile and smile and be a villain. Eto- nian charm is not a weapon; it is, as everybody describes it, disarming. Self-deprecation is our camouflage, the apparent modesty, the lack of self-promotion. Discretion is the key to the power of the establishment. It is an extraordinarily powerful posi- tion.

Think of the crocodile: when chal- lenged, its body submerges silently beneath the concealing waters; only its hooded, armoured eyes remain above the surface. This vigilant submergence is the natural Condition of those interested in preserving the status quo, self-advertisement is the noise made by those outside the charmed circle. The crocodile classes can no longer be called the ruling elite. Rule has effec- tively been denied them this century. The great landed families of England, who peo- pled the cabinets of a century ago, have been eased away from political power, long

before John Major conceived of his Utopi- an classless ideal. But their focus of interest has moved away from overt political power. Their skill now lies in holding on to a lifestyle that is both comfortable and pleasing. The descendants of those grandees — and their far poorer and less grand cousins — continue to be the bene- fiting classes, and it is easiest to benefit in secret.

Self-abasement in front of them was once quite frank. 'Thank you for your let-

ter' in the 16th century came out as: 'My honourable and singular good lady, after most humble commendations to my hon- ourable good Lord and you, this is to advertise to your ladyship that I received your kind letter.' That was from Henry VIII's chaplain to Lady Lisle, April 1535.

Equally straightforward was the assump- tion of class superiority. Beatrice Webb may not have come from the grandest class, but her sense of her own social standing was adamantine. Bertrand Russell once asked her if she had ever felt shy. 'Oh no,' she said. 'If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room of people, I would say to myself, "You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world, why should you be frightened?"'

No one would dare write or, openly any- way, think like that now. Fragments of the attitude, particularly in the penumbra of the crown, remain. The Prime Minister still has to kiss the Queen's hand, the Privy Councillors still have to stand up at Coun- cil meetings, those enjoying an audi- ence with the Queen still have to withdraw from it in reverse, as though queens could not regard backs and bottoms with equanimity. But else- where, as far as one can see, the privi- leged classes have ironed themselves down. Randall McDonnell, the Earl of Antrim's son, appeared in Country Life a couple of weeks ago. He is real- ly called Viscount Dunluce but in the magazine he is billed as Mr McDon- nell, an ordinary joe, just another farmer like anyone else, under threat like everyone else from hostile tax regimes, trying to keep 'body and roof together' just like everyone else in these hard times.

But it's not really like that, is it? What Matthew Parris called 'the rolling acres of snobbery and corrup- tion' — the under-landscape of English life, the uninspected networks of admission and exclusion — that is the really significant thing. It is some- thing which John Major's recent reforms — the world of Buggins's turn in the civil service and career-end knight- hoods — has very little to do with. It is more discreet than that; it relies on tiny lit- tle signals of acceptability and training of not-quite-rightness and not-quite-usness.

The subtlety and discretion by which this group maintains its position are rarely recognised and the received image of these people is scarcely better than a cartoon. Last week, for example, there was an arti- cle in the Independent on Sunday about the key group of Cabinet ministers who were at Cambridge together in the early Sixties — Lamont, Clarke, Fowler, Lilley, Howard the Cambridge mafia. They were not, Isabel Hilton wrote, 'boys who owed their advancement to family connections' unlike the members of the Pitt Club, 'where the rich and high-born cultivated the art of throwing bread rolls'. This portrayal of the old moneyed class as a stupid, philistine, food-throwing joke, compared with the effective meritocratic new Tories, already aiming for high political office, is a self- comforting delusion. What is the implica- tion? That old money has sunk into a befuddled, impotent and ridiculous state, and that in that state it doesn't need to be taken as seriously as the new power-hun- gry, meritocratic boys.

But the picture of old money as bun- throwing yahoos is not good enough. It is more agile than that and cleverer. The Cayzer family, rich since the 19th century, who owned the great shipping conglomer- ate British & Commonwealth, appointed a talented railwayman's son, John Gunn, to run it for them. He did well for them and in 1987 the Cayzers brillantly sold their entire interest in British & Commonwealth for about £250 million. The stock-market crash followed soon after, and, in due course, B&C went down with all hands, including John Gunn.

It is an emblematic tale, repeated in the relationship of the Guinness clan to Eric Saunders. Old money hires new talent, rides it for all it is worth, collects the divi- dends and turns off the hired hand when he is no longer useful. The Earl of Iveagh dies worth more than any other Guinness in history, Saunders goes to jail. This is a story of ruthless pursuit of self-interest and of looking after one's own. Old money does not spend its time throwing buns.

It is a class of infinite defensive resource, and the signs it uses to identify and exclude are slight and clever. By definition they are slight. At a dinner party I went to the other day, where most of the people came from the historically privileged classes, a man arrived a little late. At his entrance a stir, more curiosity about the stranger than dis- dain, moved across the room. It was no more than a riffling of the water, the quick- est of scarcely inflected looks passed from one to the other, nothing as gross as the raising of an eyebrow. What was it about this man? His clothes? Too clean, too fin- ished in their effect? (You should take, I remember being told at school, ten minutes to notice that a man is well-dressed. Any quicker and he's probably queer.) The way he removed his jacket so soon after arriv- ing, that faux-casual gesture betraying unease? The too-present teeth in his smile, doggy, over-eager? It all added up to a patent wanting to be liked. Haven't we all known it, the simultaneous pleading for acceptance and the cold knowledge that it is not being given? 'Hallo, darling,' he said to one girl. 'Are you a model?' To another: `How long have you been preggers?' At these remarks the social spines stiffened and what Auden called 'the eyelash barri- er', the unbreachable gates of exclusion, closed. He was out, he was making the wrong signs, his very attempts to be more a part of the place where he found himself were driving him further outwards. A work- ing-class man was at the same party but he received none of the conspiring looks or the pursed lips. Intuitively, the crocodile classes know that the real threat comes from the unsmart lower-middle class, which has in fact displaced them in the course of the century from political power and driven them into a form of political hiding. Those few members of the working class that pen- etrate to this world can quite safely be patronised and tolerated.

Unless you were born speaking a lan- guage, you can never learn to speak it per- fectly. Robert Maxwell's plummy drawl was surely his idea of what an English gentle- man should sound like. He could never have got it right because the languages of class, those slick recognition signals of the OK, are sucked in by the child. The laying out of spoons, the saying not of 'pardon' but of 'what?', the transmission of U and non-U — children learn this from their families and in that way class is as much a psychological as a social condition. This is the story of Pygmalion: however expert the tuition, the outsider will always, in the end, say, 'Move your blooming arse.'

People cannot cross class boundaries in their own lifetimes. The making or losing of money has nothing to do with it. If, as happened to John Major's own family when he was a boy, disaster strikes and a family finds itself too poor to fund a mid- dle-class life, they do not drop a class. They remain middle class, but traumatised by the recognition that they cannot afford to be with the class they know they are part of. This deep shock may well be somewhere behind Major's classlessness crusade. He does not really want a classless society. He is no anarchist. He wants — and it is a futile aim — a country in which that shock cannot occur.

The other side of this is the ability of rich parents to have their children trained in the correct way. You can buy a genera- tional shift. Look, for example — and one can only choose a famous example — at the Maxwell children, their charm, their discretion, their nice suits, their quiet unrumbustiousness. And they married the right kind of girls (with names like Pandora Warnford-Davis). The Maxwell boys went to the right schools and on to Oxford. In this way the benefiting classes can absorb the necessary new blood. After the hubbub is over, the scandal will fade, and the chil- dren of Kevin and Ian Maxwell will in time take their place in the class which their grandfather, in his strange, criminal and theatrical way, hankered after.

In this way the crocodile is a miraculous creature: an armoured skin, a camouflaged presence, an enormous stomach. Anything it doesn't reject it can happily swallow. And its powers of absorption are infinite. George Walker, the East End boxer who founded Brent Walker, married his daugh- ter to the Marquess of Milford Haven. Without any disturbance to the stream, Walker's grandchildren will be upper class, the genetic stock of the future Marquesses of Milford Haven will quite seamlessly have been reinvigorated and the class structure of England will have been rein- forced.

But what is the effect of this, the unseen skeletal structure of England? Nobody knows the rate of old Etonian unemploy- ment, but the headmaster, Dr Eric Ander- son, tells me it is, at most, 4 per cent, and — more significantly — has shown no increase over the last five years. (The cur- rent graduate unemployment rate is 8.5 per cent.) Sixteen of the top 100 jobs in the City are held by old Etonians. Does that mean jobs for the boys and no jobs for the non-boys? Probably. Does it mean a con- tinued prejudice against people who don't make the right signals? Probably. I know of a man who was recently turned down for a job in a merchant bank because his collar was too soft — and I heard that from a director of a bank, an old Etonian. Of course the reject had no idea his collar had anything to do with it. That is the point.

In the light of this, the recent, very public wringing of grandees' hands over the state of the nation looks rather like crocodile tears. It seems to me that the one quality for which the English gentleman has always been known in Europe — perfidy — con- tinues to be practised here more effectively than ever. I, without doubt, am a member of the benefiting classes. Daily, I recognise the recognition signals and make them myself. And as for us, I think we are doing very well, thank you, although I know I shouldn't really say so.