Class Acts

For all the talk of a thousand years and what have you, hardly any extant hereditary title predates the eighteenth century, few predate the nineteenth century, and a sizeable number are of purely twentieth-century creation.

Next to none goes back before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and unless I am very much mistaken, although certain ancient Celtic titles are also borne by various Peers elsewhere in these Islands, none at all in England goes back before the Norman Conquest.

As is the wont of conquerors, the Normans often legitimised themselves among their new subjects by taking wives from the previous Houses every male member of which they had just slain. But even so.

Any Government has always had it within its power to create as many hereditary peerages as it liked. Until recent decades, it did precisely that.

The Attlee Government created no fewer than 82 of them in the mere six years of its life, with that greatest of all Labour Prime Ministers also approving eight promotions within the Peerage, such as the bumping up of Mountbatten from a Viscount to an Earl. Attlee himself ended up an Earl, a Knight of the Garter, a member of the Order of Merit, and a Companion of Honour.

You may say that such arrivisme mirrors and complements that of the Royal House. The very few dynasties of older provenance do say exactly that.

But on one level, so what? Are we to imagine that families only sprung into existence when ennobled, and were somehow not already here before then?

If your "family came over with William the Conqueror," then it found your tenants' families already waiting for it, having been settled for several centuries. The seigneurial claim is really to be almost as much of an arriviste as the Hanoverians are.

Still, these descendants of a few Norman Conquerors and of a huge number of far later social climbers, sometimes into living memory (there will still be people alive who remember such figures as the first Viscount Hailsham and the first Viscount Stansgate), do, for good or ill, constitute the posh end of our society.

People who object to rule by it in and through the Conservative Party, for what did you ever imagine that you were voting when you voted for that party in the past? You must have had some idea, so what was it?

In any event, this was what you always got, which for most of the last century has been the Government. If you did not like it, then you ought not to have voted for it.

As for Margaret Thatcher, the blather at the time of her death about her "humble origins" only served to illustrate how we had forgotten the commercial, provincial, Liberal, Nonconformist (was ever a word less appropriate to its meaning?) magnates of whom her father was, even if vicariously and posthumously, the last to exercise national political influence. There was nothing humble about them.

Something similar presents itself in relation to the recent publication of the official biography of Roy Jenkins. Yes, his father and grandfathers had been South Wales miners. But by the time of Roy's birth, Arthur Jenkins was a well-heeled and well-connected full-time politician whose son's future was therefore assured.

Of course there used to be a ladder of working-class advancement. But it was not the grammar schools, which the working classes barely attended. It was the trade union movement and that movement's links to the Labour Party. The devastation of that movement and the erosion of those links are what has pulled up the ladder.

The beneficiaries of all of that are now as incomprehensible as the Liberal oligarchy of Alfred Roberts and his daughter was last year, or as the Fabian grandee class of Vera Brittain, George Catlin and their daughter will be when she, too, shuffles off this mortal coil.