Only the best people would deny being part of the elite
Anne McElvoy ARE you or have you ever been in the metropolitan elite? The pre-conditions are many and varied. Count yourself as one of the tribe if you know how to get a table at the Chiltern Firehouse, are on first-name terms with your MP and have even considered digging out you basement to make a wine cellar or expand your home cinema.
Joining the Met-Elite set can creep up on people because there are so many nooks and crannies of London life that produce their own hierarchies. Today’s elite is more likely to hold its launches in a tech start-up in Hoxton than at the Ivy Club and to head to I biz a summer weekends, not Wiltshire.
Alas, membership of this club is akin to a reputation for child murder in some circles. So Andy Burnham, one of t he l e a di ng L a bour l e a der shi p candidates, is busy insisting that he has no such credentials and that Labour has fallen prey to the grip of the MetElite faction (otherwise known as the Milibands).
This made him, of course, a hostage to fortune and a picture of a youthful Mr Burnham duly emerged among a c ast of s i milarly self-aware young advisers, politicians and future PR types. He is wearing (steady yourselves) a dinner jacket and bowtie. The shame. The horror. An Oresteia-type nemesis for purveyors of inverted snobbery.
Yet Andy is not alone in having to
for square a privileged education with a claim to having somehow escaped the osmotic process of being upwardly mobile. An even more audacious denial comes from the new editor of the Morning Star, an admirer of the Chinese Communist Party who writes plaintively of the struggles of “our class” while armed with a degree from Oxford.
One reason the tag is so idiotic is that it allows everyone to disclaim it. An old-school Tory who dines at Brooks’s club can complain about the “trendy” metropolitan set running the arts and quangos. Labourites like Mr Burnham can imply the moral superiority of eschewing elites while being a Ca mbri d ge g r a d u a t e a nd top -tier politician since his early thirties.
The most reassuring thing about the category is that it is always someone else. A colleague says he can’t be in it because he has kids at state schools but, on reflection, reckons that a good chunk of fellow parents are something in the media or politics.
Mr Burnham is effectively pleading the “northern defence”— that he hails from outside the capital and is thus outside its hierarchies. I do find this useful, being a northerner, but I am not sure it really washes once you have spent decades at the heart of London-based institutions. Lord Bragg, Lord Puttnam, Lord Hall (the BBC director-general) and Cherie and Tony Blair are all part of the mass migration from north to commanding positions in the south.
Also, denying that you are in an elite has a perverse way of reinforcing the idea that you might be just that. People who are really distant from any sort of metropolitan elite know full well that there is a gulf between them and those, Left or Right, in the so-called elites.
If in doubt, consider that those who get most worked up about who is or isn’t in an elite tend to have at least half a foot in one, social, ac ademic or professional. Or they are part of the other great London tribe: convinced that a mysterious gang is running the show, but not quite sure who.
Those who get most worked up about who is or isn’t in an elite tend to have half a foot in one