Whatever Happened to the English Upper Classes? Thoughts prompted by David Cameron's Memoirs

I am much amused by the David Cameron memoir, which turns out to be a good deal more spiteful and vindictive than I guessed it would be. Large chunks of its denunciations of the Prime Minister, Alexander Johnson, and of other leading Tories, will no doubt find their way into Labour and Lib Dem propaganda during the coming election (assuming it is still coming, which I am no longer quite sure about).

 

That���s done now. Anyone can question the wisdom of behaving in this way, but that���s what he chose to do, and it is hard to believe he did not realise its possible effects. I am, as so often, puzzled as to how he obtained a First-Class degree from Oxford. He seems only vaguely conscious of so many of the hard rules of life.

 

I think there���s a lot of truth in his criticisms of his major colleagues, especially Mr Cameron���s assertion that Al Johnson ���did not believe��� in leaving the EU , was certain that Leave would lose, and backed the Leave campaign only to help his political career. I assumed this from a distance, and am amused to find that Mr Cameron concluded the same thing from close quarters and much better acquaintance.

 

In the same way I was as baffled as he was by the transformation of my old friend Michael Gove (once pretty complacent about the EU issue, to my certain knowledge) into a fervent leaver. Cameron describes him as taking up ���positions that were completely against his political identity���, which I think is a good way of putting it.

 

None of this makes me warm to Mr Cameron, a PR man without qualities who - on the few awkward occasions when we met - impressed me as a good example of a very interesting caste, Tory in upbringing and wealth, radical or the very least unconservative in personal habits and attitudes,  which I had not really understood or met before. These memoirs confirm all my impressions.

 

The phrase ���Bourgeois Bohemians���, really an American one, describes them very well. They have all the outward appearance of the comfortably-off privately-educated unshowy classes from whom they are descended and who used to be the backbone of conservative England.

 

But in their inner hearts they are completely beguiled by modernity. Their personal morality is relaxed, they take illegal drugs without a twinge of worry, they swear in front of women and children, they have a sketchy knowledge of history and a diluted sentimental patriotism which, it seems to me, doesn���t really have any practical application. Religion, for most of them, is a faint background noise. They���ve vaguely heard of Trafalgar, but they don���t know in any detail what happened there or why it matters. They���re not very well up in the classics of English literature and poetry, even when formally well-educated.

 

This troubles me because I recall, especially in my prep-school years in the early 1960s, being very conscious of the existence and nature of the previous generation of the same people, some of whom taught me. No doubt many of them were pretty limited in their minds and experience. But not all of them were, most of them thought what they jolly well liked and didn���t ever seek to follow fashion, and they were just so much more English than the new lot. Naturally Christian, naturally filled with an inexpressible love of country, far too profound to be spoken of, they just got on with things. Yes, that was what they did.  They got on with things.  

 

I wish I could reproduce in its entirety last week���s marvellous obituary of General Sir Hugh Beach in ���The Times���.General Beach died on 4th September aged 96. Let me see if I can find some extracts which make the point.

 

It opens thus: ���Having landed in Normandy shortly after D-Day, Hugh Beach, a young officer in the Royal Engineers, was ordered to clear a road of mines in readiness for a transport of anti-tank guns. With this task apparently done, he watched in horror as the first vehicle in the convoy drove over a hidden mine and exploded. He cleared the road again and then jumped on the mudguard of the second vehicle and ordered it to drive forward. If the road was still not cleared, he reasoned, he did not want to have to be around to witness the consequences.

���A few weeks after this, while attached to the 11th Hussars, he was sent to reconnoitre a bridge over La Bass��e Canal in Belgium on foot, under heavy machinegun fire, and received a bullet wound across his spine that left him temporarily paralysed. Before being evacuated to hospital he insisted on filing a full report, which made it possible for British tanks to capture the bridge before dark.���

 

There���s also this ���He did not look, nor was he, the typical military commander. Careless and professorial in dress ( he went to Winchester and Peterhouse) , smilingly charming but often deep in thought, his success came from his skill in getting to the root of problems and his genuine sense of purpose. He gained the confidence of officers and soldiers alike, but not always their affection because of a perceived sense of intellectual superiority.

���In 1951 Beach married Estelle Mary Henry, with whom he had travelled home on a London bus after a religious discussion at a private house in Peckham Rye. She trained as a doctor and practised throughout their marriage until her early death from an aortic embolism in 1989.���

 

Or ���[he was] a witty speaker with a lucid pen and intellectual integrity, who was able to articulate and influence policy in complex subjects in ways that few of his contemporaries could match. While he never foisted his religious beliefs on others, his first-class mind was honed by Christian commitment.

���In later life he was said to be the cleverest general of his generation. He was also one of the most controversial, given his opposition to the renewal of Trident, the British nuclear deterrent. His stance was based not on moral grounds but on practical ones. In a letter to The Times in 2009, he argued that no British government would ever authorise a nuclear strike either in deterrence or in retaliation and condemned Trident as useless.���