Is the aristocracy changing, in face if not in spirit? Prince Harry is marrying Meghan Markle, a divorced mixed-race television actor, parodied in the Channel 4 comedy The Windsors. “I’m Meghan from Suits,” was almost her only line, and she was always in a tracksuit pouting at Pippa Middleton, who was – in this telling – fat, evil and into Harry. According to the fashion press, which observes them closely, the dead-bird-in-the-hair toff who shops at Tesco to preserve the estate is dead, mostly from mockery. When the Bullingdon Club convened for its most recent photograph at Christchurch, Oxford, dressed as 20 Lord Nelsons, they were heckled, and someone played the Benny Hill theme tune Yackety Sax at them.
These new toffs are woke, glossy and active on Twitter. They visit personal trainers and psychotherapists. Lady Violet Manners retweets criticism of antisemitism in the Labour party. Lady Kitty Spencer is an ambassador for the homeless charity Centrepoint. Some are not really toffs, but loving parodies. Georgia “Toff” Toffolo, the star of Made In Chelsea and most recent winner of I’m A Celebrity…, is the poster-girl toff of the age, signed by a newspaper to discuss toff things in a weekly column, and her father is a scrap metal dealer called Gary. To me, that proves how little the rest of us understand them. Even so, she slides through life gasping, soliciting the company of Stanley Johnson with highlights in her hair.
I am Jewish, and middle-class, so I share the national obsession with class: all those childhood weekends at Hampton Court wondering why the Christopher Wren part looks like Bentalls department store. (The answer is: it’s a copy. Bentalls, not the palace.) And I have a weakness for Cardinal Wolsey, the son of a butcher, who was a sort of Tudor Georgia “Toff” Toffolo. I suppose I want to know why I am not considered as excellent as they are. My school was a parody of their schools. My university, Oxford, was built to educate them, but because the elite is self-interested enough to be porous, they let me in.
It is easy to laugh at toffs and their idiocies, but they are serious about survival, and good at it. The idiocies are both a disguise and a state of national denial. I have read the data. They may be exiled from the House of Lords – except for 92 who remain, like hostages – but in central London the Grosvenors, the Russells, the Portmans and the Howard de Waldens own the land beneath your feet. Fourteen aristocrats are richer than the Queen. The Duke of Westminster is worth £9bn. Anyone who has held on to an estate and survived the collapse of land prices in the early 20th century is very rich.
When I first met posh people, as a newspaper diarist 20 years ago – they were, by then, too stupid or lazy to attend Oxford in large numbers – they still matched the cliche of the 1980s, as detailed in Peter York’s Sloane Ranger Handbook. The men wore red trousers and brayed. They called me “Tarn-ya”. (They can’t compute the flat A of “Tanya”: it’s too common.) The women were slender, blond and cold. My colleague Emma Parker Bowles was rumoured to be a girlfriend of Prince William (she was not) and we had to answer the telephone on her behalf and tell other journalists to stop bothering her – a conceit she loved. The posh people didn’t stay long. It – I mean talking and thinking critically – was too much like hard work. They moved into public relations where there is less conflict, or they moved on, and Emma’s aunt is nearly Queen of England now.
It is easy to observe posh people – I am a restaurant critic and I see them at Wiltons sucking claret – but much harder to know them. My posh friends – I have a few, at the edges, all male (I find the females unreliable and selfish) – are quite emotionally cauterised, unless drunk. Their best relationships with women are usually with their cleaners. It’s boarding school, I suppose; when you put on the mask that young, it’s hard to remove it. Good manners are the substitute, and it’s effective; I have met almost no one as charming or as secretive as an Old Etonian.
Still, to celebrate the wedding of Harry to Meghan from Suits, I go toff hunting. It is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you are writing for the Guardian; any sniff of socialism and off they run, like hares. The Duke of Devonshire is busy, so I can relay only my reminiscences of staying in a converted stable at Chatsworth. It was not my idea. There was marketing literature in which the duke and duchess were photographed under a tagline “the best of friends”, as an incitement to become a “member” and browse the shop for books about the internal lives of chickens. There was a direct debit form on the back. Nancy Mitford once said that all toffs consider themselves poor and compete among themselves for the greatest turnover from gawping visitors.
The Duke of Marlborough is also busy, but I don’t really mind because I can’t think of anything interesting to write about Blenheim, except that it’s got a very big roof. I have interviewed the next Marchioness of Bath, who lives in the old nursery suite at Longleat in the middle of a safari park and seems lost there, even if she does have a small Titian. I press on. I am assured that the Manners sisters are “media friendly” and will speak to me but, as I refuse to lie and say I am writing about social change for Vogue, they don’t.
I am not allowed to visit Robin Birley’s private London club, 5 Hertford Street, although I have known the publicist since the 20th century. He is one of the red-trousered ones parodied on the blog Look At My Fucking Red Trousers, which exists to disseminate photographs of men wearing red trousers, or sometimes photographs of the trousers by themselves. Laugh at the trousers; ignore the stranglehold. I am not allowed into the new Annabel’s, not even when it is closed. I have a flashback to the time that a publicist from Quintessentially – a concierge company co-founded by the Duchess of Cornwall’s nephew Ben Elliot – called me a chav. I emailed her to say I had been asked to write about Quintessentially for a magazine. She replied, “Nice try, chav.” Fifteen years later, I am still trying to compose an adequate reply.
I consider going to an open day at the Royal Agricultural University at Cirencester and pretending I want to take a BSc (Hons) in rural land management, but that would be awkward (I am 44). So, instead, I go to the Cheltenham festival, to see them in groups doing what they love: watching horses running from point A to point B very fast. They look like a vast curling dragon made of Barbour. The Duchess of Cornwall wanders into the parade ring to congratulate someone on owning a very expensive horse that has won a race. There is a clear divide between the old and young female toff: the older ones are not vain, not at all (that is the confidence of status) and are dressed for wind, like igloos; the younger ones, vulnerable to celebrity culture and fashion idiocy, are. They are ferociously styled in a sort of mass Crocodile Dundee chic; many wear ponchos, and rancher-style hats on blond heads, as if they are popping off to murder a cow before cocktails. We watch from a sort of amphitheatre called the parade ring and clap the horses (I hope it is the horses); aristocracy as spectacle, as it always was.
I have forgotten, despite my diarist’s training, how difficult it is to infiltrate these circles, even if I had faith that they could define themselves in their own words – which they can’t, because they have never had to. (You can count the good toff novelists on one hand.) Words come almost always from unease, and they have none. But I have plenty. I walk up to the Duke of Beaufort and say hello. I once met him at a party, and he was friendly then, possibly because I was with a posh girl who had the talent of waving her arms about and talking about nothing, with soaring cadences, and looking lovely doing it. Hello, Bunter, I say now. (Silly names are an essential part of the camouflage. It’s hard to fear someone named after a cartoon character or dog.) He looks at me as if I am a piece of garden furniture that has spoken, and mutters an incomprehensible half-syllable. It is a moan for me to go away; it is barely speech.
I am invited to dine in a private members’ club called Albert’s, named for Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, which is, very occasionally, opened to non-members. Stylistically, it is horrifying: coked-up Balmoral, if you can imagine such a thing. There are paintings of horses and an installation of what I suspect are fake ecstasy pills, branded Hermès. We eat the sort of food you get in any gentleman’s club, in vast portions – fish, red meat, caviar – and watch, as the dining room is turned into a nightclub. Young toffs scream and play with their hair. Ancient toffs dance to 70s trash disco, commemorating some anniversary known only to themselves.
And then I find one who is willing to speak to me. His name is Francis Fulford and he starred in the reality TV show The Fucking Fulfords – for money, he said on screen. (He has 3,000 acres that are worth £30m.) His family have lived at Great Fulford, Devon, for 27 or 28 generations – he isn’t sure – or since Richard the Lionheart’s time.
I meet him there, in a four-square crenellated house with a central courtyard in which two small and shabby cars are parked. He wears brown cords and a blue jumper. He is shadowed by a big dog and a little dog. His voice is extraordinary. It rises and falls, very slowly. Posh people never speak fast. They do not have to, because they have an expectation of being listened to. I understand perhaps a third of what he says to me in person, half of what I have on the Dictaphone. We speak in an old kitchen with an Aga, except it’s the new kitchen: the old kitchen is down a cold, stone passageway. It’s Tudor.
Perhaps it is because I don’t know any aristocrats intimately, but Fulford seems barely of this world. He is not a buffoon. There are books everywhere; that aristocrats don’t read is a myth. They simply prefer to hide their cleverness, as they hide their ruthlessness; it’s the art of war. He goes to Sainsbury’s to buy cheap wine on special offer, and mows his own parkland, but he speaks of dead men – Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Becket, who was murdered by his ancestor Reginald Fitzurse – as if they are personally known to him.
His cares are unusual. “If you have a house like this,” he says, “and land, you spend your entire time planning your death. Ever since I’ve been born, I’ve been planning my death. It is slightly depressing.”
He has a slight persecution complex. There is his resentment towards Cromwell, which is understandable because he tried to blow up his house, and also “the tax man. He has always aimed to destroy us as much as possible”. At one point he asks me, without irony, “What’s the nation ever done for me or my family?”
His father died in 1969, when he was 17. “Those days were bloody awful, especially for places like this. JR Milne said the country house as we know it is like the osprey, doomed to extinction. In 20 years there will be none left apart from a few in public ownership or the National Trust.”
Fulford’s life is not so different from his father’s. He does less public service, locals do not doff their caps (they do not wear them) and he has no full-time servants. The deference has gone, but the money has not. “Nothing changes – we still live in the country, still make money from agriculture, still follow country pursuits.” He entertains to earn money: “A few business events, a couple of music festivals, a few tours of the house, people staying for shooting, the odd wedding, the odd stag party.”
We tour the house. He doesn’t know how many rooms he has. In the yard, which is medieval, there is a designated area for making gates. His coat of arms is on a bin.
He doesn’t think primogeniture, which kept these estates intact, while those in continental Europe were divided, is unfair: “The aim is always to try and pass on to your son something in a better state than when you received it. I think if I died tomorrow and did go up and meet my father and my ancestors, I would be able to look them in the eye.” At the end he lets me photograph him with a dead squirrel, killed in a trap. Fulford leaves me with a definitive insight. “The aim,” he says, “is to survive.” He then disposes of the squirrel, which did not.
Tom Galbraith, who used to be the Tory leader in the House of Lords, tells me you cannot understand the aristocracy in terms of centuries. They think, and plan, in millennia. They are flesh, not stone, and they adapt with every generation to the world that is. And so you might think Harry and his set have nothing in common with the Fulfords. They behave more like the international rich, whose obscene wealth fuels the idea that the land-owning British aristocracy are comparatively poor, and their addled sense of victimhood, which is simply the misery of not having everything your own way, as in 1311. They visit Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire and dress like the younger Trumps; they drive new Land Rovers and drink Grey Goose vodka martinis; Harry pretends to be a feminist, though possibly only to impress a woman. It is a sheen of “democratisation” that is, if you think critically, nothing of the sort. Marrying a middle-class girl and talking nonsense about equality when your entire existence is dependent on hereditary power is not a radical act. It is hypocrisy, and the theft of language from others who need it more.
Peter York says the aristocracy are less boastful than they used to be – this is camouflage again, a strategy for survival in a quasi-equal age. They are leaky: they try to suck anything dangerous, or potentially profitable upwards, and plenty fall away – so the marriage of Harry to Meghan is not so strange. Rather it is the natural progression of a class that acts, despite the propaganda that calls privilege duty, in its own interests. (I doubt Harry’s feminism will aid one single woman.) Aristocrats have always married heiresses, and Americans, and even Jews. They will take the tribute toffs and the interlopers, if they are loyal, and grateful, and fix the roof, and steady the power; anything to push the good ship Class onwards.
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