The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses [Hardcover]

George Walden's The New Elites begins with a number of assumptions; first, that elites are defensible and desirable provided they are open; second, that Britain is a country where populist elites have never been more powerful or ubiquitous; and finally, that these new elites are more difficult to spot because our thinking about elites and masses remains congealed in Left/Right configurations. As befits a polymath and Cambridge scholar, Walden demonstrates his wide reading but, for a former Conservative Member of Parliament, he draws on some surprising sources for his sparkling political and cultural analysis: perhaps less incongruously from the Machiavellians Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and Gaetano Mosca, but the self-confessed "anti-politician" who was not afraid to tell Tory grandees to bugger off also loses a few more friends at the Reform Club by employing those sainted elders of left-thinking intellectuals Antonio Gramsci and Hannah Arendt to hold a looking-glass up to Britannia.

Inevitably, one of the shortcomings of this ambitious book is that it covers too much ground too quickly. If the emergence of this new class is a genuine phenomenon--and Walden's argument certainly feels right in many ways--then it needs more than anecdotal support to bring it into convincing focus. But the real gold to be mined in Walden's slice through British cultural life is the searching and piquant questions he brings out into the open and the suggestiveness of the answers. If each age creates its own distinctive elites, in a populist democracy, what will ours look like? Does it make sense to think of "the masses" in terms of the social underdog? Ultimately, although intellectuals will no doubt tut at its breezy polemic, The New Elites is an educated, persuasive critique of the outworn political and sociological categorisations with which we think about "democracy", and "culture". This is a short, sharp, invigorating read , pithy, wise and irreverent in all the right places. Supporters of the Dome, Brit-art and Princess Diana prepare to be offended. --Larry Brown

'You have to read it.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Rousing, funny.'
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Far from being classless, Britain is icnreasingly ruled by oligarchies of professional egalitarians. By exploiting popular sentiment and taste, the privileged and opportunistic can earn fortunes and occupy positions of authority, while all the time protesting that they are only giving the public what they want. In this text, Gerge Walden unmasks the new elites, a class whose ambitions for social control rival their aristocratic forbears and whose populum is in its own way as damaging to democracy.

Britain is governed by an oligarchy of professional egalitarians,
many of them from privileged backgrounds, whose power and wealth
increasingly depends on the more or less cynical exploitation of populism
in politics, the media and the arts. While in power, the Tory
Party--lamenting low educational standards and intoning sombrely about
family values--had been happy to endorse the increased commercialisation of
television. The profits would go largely to friends of the Party, while for
reasons too obvious to recite their own children would be spared much of
the cultural squalor that crudely populist TV programmes would encourage.

Even so, who would have predicted that an Etonian of three years
parliamentary standing (whose experience of life had been predominantly as
a PR executive for a TV company notorious for its low standards) would be
elected leader of the Conservative party? That person would until recently
have been denounced as a cynic. And if they had, furthermore, suggested
that one of the first things a future contender for the Tory leadership
would do would be to share with us the contents of his iPod and enthuse
about his favourite single, they would have been laughed off as a hopeless
pessimist.

Reality has, in fact, turned out to be a caricature. For the first
time in our history both major political parties are now led by what are
inverted elites: well-born, privately educated men who vie with one another
in affecting populist attitudes. Being from a superior social caste to
Blair, it is in the logic of the new elites that Cameron should stoop
lower, and so he does. A trivial example is their choice of records on
Desert Island Disks: whereas Blair included three classical recordings in
his choices Cameron trumped him by having none at all.

Cameron is to some extent the political expression of the Princess
Diana phenomenon. Diana was the patron saint of these new elites, and
Cameron has clearly learned a lot from her. They not only look a little
alike--it seems to me--but, it has been written, may be distantly related.
She spooned with the masses, and so does he. Both are upper-class figures
who nevertheless contrive to lay claim to victim status: Diana exploited
her difficulties with the royal family to gain public sympathy, and
Cameron, somewhat distastefully, makes political play with his disabled
son.

The politics of sentiment increasingly dominate public discussion, and
sentimentality tinged with cynicism was what Diana was about. The same is
true of Cameron's social politics. The cant of the new elites emerges with
numbing shamelessness in his public declarations. Recently the one-time PR
man for ruthlessly profitable trash TV made a heartfelt speech in which he
said that money wasn't everything--and that the quality of our culture
mattered. In his more mawkish mode it is possible to discern in the
Conservative leader's political pitch a faint echo of Diana's Christ-like
affectations. With her it was a scrupulously choreographed contact with
people sick with Aids. With Cameron it is an ostentatious tolerance of the
lower orders: suffer the hoodies and the hoodlums to come unto me. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.