It may be Oasis making the comeback, but Pulp’s Common People seems to better suit the age.
Britain’s elites are swapping posh pastimes such as hunting and the opera for grittier hobbies such as football and downing pints of beer. Or at least they pretend they are in public, according to the sociologist authors of a mammoth new study of the inhabitants of UK society’s upper echelons.
Whereas the elites of British life were once confident in their lofty status, projecting “ordinariness” is now more prized in public, the sociologists say. They suggest “insecurity about their legitimacy” now leads many British elites to publicly engage in “pernicious cosplay, masquerading as common people” to avoid being seen as “snobbish or aloof”, even if in private they act as exclusively as ever.
So while British elites may prefer to be seen in public as fans of a commoner’s Cigarettes and Alcohol, behind the scenes they still secretly glug a glitzier Champagne Supernova.
The seven-year study was undertaken by academics Sam Friedman of London School of Economics (LSE) and Aaron Reeves, latterly of Oxford University but who will next week rejoin LSE. They have laid out their findings in a new book, Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite.
It examines how private school-educated wealthy Britons, many of whom came through Oxford and Cambridge universities, still have a vice-like grip on the tiller of British power and privilege in spheres such as politics, business, entertainment and media.
But as shown by Oxford-educated former prime ministers such as “Just call me Dave” Cameron, an old Etonian, and Winchester-schooled Rishi Sunak, who claimed his favourite food was “sandwiches”, the elite often publicly fetishise being common without necessarily having the requisite touch.
The sociologists broadly defined Britain’s elite through their membership of the Who’s Who society reference publication, which annually since 1847 has listed the purportedly most important people in Britain by dint of their positions and reputations.
Friedman and Reeves analysed data from 125,000 Who’s Who profiles over the last 125 years, including the 33,000 people who appear in the latest edition. They also cross referenced Who’s Who listings with other records, such as probate data and published rich lists, to identify the roughly 6,000 members of the elite who are also in the wealthiest 1 per cent of society.
They trawled further sources, such as answers given by any of the Who’s Who elites who had appeared on BBC’s Desert Island Discs, to build a deeper picture of their publicly-acknowledged habits and likes. They then topped off the research with more than 200 in-depth and anonymised interviews with members of the elite, giving them a better picture of their habits in private and revealing the inconsistencies.
More than 40 per cent who claimed to the researchers that they originally came from working-class backgrounds actually came from more middle-class backgrounds when the researchers probed further.
“Ordinariness has real currency with the public. People are more sympathetic to it [than elitism],” said Friedman this week, over breakfast in a Westminster restaurant located a mere croquet thwack from the parliamentary bastion of political power.
About 80 per cent of those currently listed as elites are men, and they are 96.8 per cent white. Of new entrants in recent years, 25 per cent were women but just 3 per cent were men from ethnic minorities and 1 per cent were ethnic minority women.
The researchers found that women and ethnic minority members of the elite were not as right-leaning politically as the white men who dominate. They also concluded that the most prominent ethnic minority elites, such as Sunak and Suella Braverman, the hard-right former home secretary, held views that were not consistent with the views of other ethnic minority elites.
Much of the research focused on how Britain’s elite structures are shaped by a small number of private schools. Nine per cent of elites attended one of the so-called Clarendon group of just nine secondary schools, including Eton, Harrow and Winchester.
About 35 per cent were educated at Oxford or Cambridge, versus less than 1 per cent of the overall population. Pupils from Clarendon schools were found to be 52 times more likely than students from other schools to reach elite status, as defined by the researchers via membership of Who’s Who.
Clarendon schools have produced two-thirds of all British prime ministers and more than half of all holders of the British government’s four great offices of state – prime minister, home secretary, foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer.
The recent change in government in Britain following Labour’s July election victory has heralded a sweeping change in the societal make-up of the people running the country. Close to 70 per cent of Sunak’s Tory cabinet were private schooled, compared with 17 per cent of Keir Starmer’s team.
Reeves suggested Britain should also “tackle the durable and entrenched power of elite schools” and “break the link” between wealth and “elite reproduction” – the ways in which people become members of the elite, such as through certain professions.
The researchers recommend wealth and property taxes, quotas on the number of private school-educated pupils at top universities and other measures including appointing workers to company boards to help to speed up the diversification of Britain’s elite.
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