Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain. Harry Wallop

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CHAPTER 2

       FAMILY

      How important are your birth certificate and maternity ward in deciding what class you end up in? Here we meet the Portland Privateers and the Middleton classes.

      2011 was acknowledged to be an abnormally busy year for news. A devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Arab Spring, bogeymen Bin Laden and Gaddafi both killed in a violent and dramatic way, the News of the World shut down by scandal, the worst riots on Britain’s streets in a generation – all events that demanded acres of coverage and analysis. But there was one story, above all, that obsessed the British press: the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. This was partly because there had not been a royal wedding on a large scale since 1986 (you need to discount the low-key second marriage of the Prince of Wales and any event involving the Earl and Countess of Wessex); partly because they looked like two attractive young adults genuinely pleased to be tying the knot; partly because many of us love a soldier in uniform, and the Household Cavalry in their pomp, because the sun shone and we were granted an extra bank holiday. But more than anything it was the story of how not just Kate, but also her parents, Carole and Mike, had ended up on the Buckingham Palace balcony sharing the limelight with Britain’s premier family. It was, in some ways, a modern wedding embraced by the YouTube and Twitter generation – the wedding was, up to that point, the most streamed event on the internet. However, at its heart was an old-fashioned story about class, and it was the Middleton family’s very particular status and position which appeared to inject the necessary ‘fairy-tale’ element into the big day.

      The Daily Express described the engagement thus: ‘From Pit to Palace; the Middletons used to be miners, now they can boast a future queen.’ The Daily Mail’s take was ‘From Pit to Palace, the first steps in a very upwardly mobile family.’ The Times went with ‘From Pit to Princess, the long journey of the Middleton family.’ Even the Guardian, many of whose readers are of a republican bent, wrote in its leader: ‘Hats off to the prince and commoner Kate.’ The coverage was unequivocal and curiously old-fashioned: not only was there a unanimous belief that the class system very much existed in Britain – and their readers immediately understood the terms and conditions – but that social mobility was also alive and well. During the week of Kate’s engagement, 192 newspaper articles mentioned her family’s class. Apparently it was impossible to mention the Middletons without reference to their supposedly humble background. Kate’s story was one that confirmed there was hope for us all. However miserably horny-handed and proletarian we may be, we could one day end up a Royal Highness waving to the adoring crowd. Karl Marx’s belief was that one day we would become a classless society, but that was not the lesson of the Middleton family – they appeared to prove the triumph of the lower orders’ ability to climb up the ladder, not to dispense with the ladder altogether.

      In this regard, the attention was focused not really on Kate, nor on her Royal Hotness Pippa, but on Carole Middleton, the mother of the bride. It was her family history which gave the story its potency. Kate herself was already in an elite of sorts, just one of the 7 per cent to be educated privately, and at Marlborough, a top boarding school, at that. Michael Middleton, Kate’s father, came from a long line of respectable and successful county solicitors, was privately educated and had been a senior employee at British Airways. Carole, by contrast, was not just a former air stewardess but the daughter of a lorry driver turned builder and the granddaughter of a miner. Within one generation she had travelled from a council house in Southall, west London, to stand next to the Queen in front of a million cheering people. The journalist Amanda Platell, in what was meant to be a hymn of praise for Mrs Middleton’s poise and elegant dress on the wedding day, couldn’t halt a tide of class-based judgements in the pages of the Daily Mail. ‘The woman from the council estate, whose daughter was once pursued by taunts of “doors to manual” by William’s toff friends because her mother had been an air hostess, was about to watch her daughter marry the future King of England. Who could deny her a wry smile of satisfaction? She may be a social climber, her daughters may be called the “Wisteria sisters” for their ability to climb and cling on so tenaciously, but the Middleton women on this day triumphed. The bride, the mother of the bride and the maid of honour – all of them middle-class Middletons and proud of it. Kate had got her man.’

      This social mobility exercised by Carole was achieved by a combination of hard work, the accumulation of wealth, ingenuity and education – the traditional routes up the class ladder – and the oldest of them all: marriage. You may be born into a certain class, but you can marry out of it.

      It is often assumed that before the war the class system was as rigid as a coronet. If you were born into a family of coal miners, you were destined to be sent down the pit yourself. If your birth was ushered in with a courtesy title and trees planted in your honour, you would always reside in the upper classes. This was true for many, possibly most. But long before the war social mobility was very much part of British life, thanks in part to the grammar school system, which catapulted many into university, enabling millions to leap-frog their parents. And the Establishment had always welcomed plutocrats, public servants and political fighters to its ranks, not least by creating hereditary peerages for many of them. Arguably, Harold Macmillan, in creating the concept of a life peer – and the resulting complete decline in the creation of hereditary peers (Macmillan himself was one of only three non-Royal hereditary peers created since 1965) – was instrumental in kicking away one of the ladders up which people could climb.

      But beyond industry and education, marriage was always the quickest guarantee of ensuring that your children began life in a different class from the one in which you did. While that is spectacularly so with any children that the Duchess of Cambridge may have – among them the future monarch of the Commonwealth realms – it is also just as much the case with Carole Middleton herself. She gave birth to three children who have ended up in a dramatically higher class than she was, principally thanks to her marriage to Michael Middleton.

      It can work the other way too, of course. And at this point I should explain my family and how my four children have ended up as a triumphant product of the fluidity and perversity of the British class system. My children were born into a distinctly lower class than one of their grandfathers, my father, and an assuredly higher one than their other grandfather, my father-in-law. My own father was born in the nursery of the house that had been in the Wallop family since Elizabethan times, and as a son of an Earl was immediately granted a title. If we are being honest, it’s about the lowliest one there is: The Honourable. Five rungs on the ladder below a standard Duke, six below a Royal Duke and waving rights on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Though, according to comically intricate rules of precedence, if he should ever be invited to a State Banquet he gets to sit closer to the Queen than any Knight and he trumps the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Take that, Gideon. He started life as unambiguously posh. Of course that’s a word the posh never use. They say ‘smart’. Nurses, cooks, monogrammed linen, a house with a sprung ballroom, ‘map room’ and library, shooting, fishing, a few thousand acres of Hampshire farmland to explore. It was all his.

      But despite the silver spoon, the history, the entry in Burke’s Peerage, the enormous advantages that were bestowed on him on his birth, he was always destined to end up in a lower class than his own father. The die was cast by the mere fact that my father was born after his older brother. He would never become an Earl, never inherit a prime dairy herd, never sit in the House of Lords. That is how primogeniture works, and one of the principal reasons for the enormous power the aristocracy held in Britain for about 900 years – their estates and wealth were not divided up between all their children, as happened on the Continent. They became concentrated in one individual. Among the über-aristocracy there are enough subsidiary estates to fund all the children into a life of luxury. Not so with the Earldom of Portsmouth, which was never awash with cash, but fell into impoverishment after the war. My cousin and I, himself a younger son of a different Earl (the aristocracy СКАЧАТЬ