What a week for Eton. It will certainly be able to raise its £35,700-a-year fees after the deluge of publicity generated by former pupils David Cameron and Justin Welby and their colourfully disruptive families. Grace under pressure, isn’t that what they pay to acquire? The prime minister stumbled badly but may yet recover his poise. The oilman turned archbishop never lost it.
By the weekend the row over Cameron’s tax affairs, arising from Guardian disclosures from the Panama Papers, ran in parallel with the revelations about Welby’s real father. Indeed, conspiracy theorists on Twitter were quick to ask whether the latter was published by the Daily Telegraph to distract from the former. Life is usually less cunning. Cock-up trumps conspiracy.
What the two stories have in common, apart from eye-popping posh detail, is the glimpse they provide into how the other half – by which I mean the 5% – live, even in tough (for them) times. It is a world where there is always sensible tax-planning to be done and houses to be passed on efficiently to the next generation, sometimes in an atmosphere of sexual licence that might not be tolerated on a rough council estate.
We know all this from fiction. The Etonian Anthony Powell’s mid-century novels and the dark comedies of Evelyn Waugh, more biting by virtue of his envious outsider status, tell the whole story, as newspaper readers were denied the real-life versions at the time by press lords’ censorship.
If Aditya Chakrobortty is even half right, public tolerance has evaporated since the banking crash of 2008. That presumption toward disclosure is a difference reinforced by this wild west era of tech-driven disclosure (will it last?). This stuff usually comes out in the end, much as Sir Anthony Montague Browne (Welby’s real father) told his long-suffering wife. “I’m told I have a son … I shan’t tell you [who]. But you’ll find out one day.”
She did, after her friend (it’s an ever-smaller world the closer you get to the top) Jane Williams’s son Justin Welby started appearing on TV a lot. Mutual friends noticed his striking resemblance to Winston Churchill’s dashing private secretary (1952-65). Eventually, Charles Moore, the former Telegraph editor and well-connected Etonian biographer of Margaret Thatcher, confronted the archbishop with the story.
That’s the point where Welby’s response looks so much better than Cameron’s when confronted yet again with awkward questions about his inheritance and the manner in which his privileged upbringing was financed. Faced with personal embarrassment and distress for his 86-year-old mother, Welby dealt with it directly. Cameron prevaricated.
Facts are better than conjecture, the churchman told Moore. So Welby took the DNA test and issued a dignified statement to his equally fractious flock on Friday night. Twitter vigilantes who predicted he’d have to resign singularly missed the point. Welby is the one person in the saga who could not be accused of misconduct.
Fast-forward to very different times, more open, less deferential, more hostile to the much-diminished “elites” who govern important aspects of our lives. If Tory newspaper owners had heard of Churchill’s 1953 stroke (only close staff did) they would have suppressed it. Not any more. Now they play the populist card (except when it suits them).
Cameron says he has paid all tax that was due, but in first dismissing it as a “personal matter” (not for the first time) he allowed personal feelings – protective, but also the cringing prospect of seeing his own financial washing hung out to dry – got in the way of a PR man’s judgment. Would disgraced ex-tabloid editor Andy Coulson’s hard-nosed presence in No 10 have forced him to think more clearly instead of prevaricating? It’s possible.
If the week won’t damage Welby (some recent predecessors would have handled it less well) but make him seem more human, how will Cameron emerge from his problems. Pollsters tend to say such incidents serve mainly to reinforce voters’ existing views, in which case the pro-EU cause may not have suffered such a hammer blow.
Those who see him as basically honest and competent, eager to protect his father’s name, will probably think no worse. Chances are they share a dislike of inheritance tax (widely held) and understand the impulse to protect family assets in the same way that the Milibands and Benns both did (quite legally) with homes. I pluck two examples from the air at random.
Those who see Cameron, George Osborne (whose tax affairs may be more interesting) and fellow cabinet members as too posh to push for Port Talbot steel workers – or those threatened by today’s changes in the awful housing bill – will be confirmed in their prejudices. Both have valid points on their side. The job of politicians is to fairly reconcile the needs and ambitions of both. We need both.
So on to the thought that Cameron’s thoroughly ordinary home in W10 – much photographed this weekend – is now worth an estimated £3m – double what he paid for it, having acquired a few improvements. It can be rented out for a tax-liable £100,000 a year, two-thirds of Cameron’s official salary. That is as shocking a detail as any I have read about his finances.
Britain’s affordable housing crisis is a pressing scandal too and it impacts directly on many more lives.
