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All hail to the new Establishment Samuel Brittan Financial Times 10/11/07 Review of The Triumph of the Political Class by Peter Oborne, Simon & Schuster, £18.99, 390pp and Crap: a guide to politics by Terry Arthur, Continuum, £9.99, 173pp In 1955 Henry Fairlie wrote a classic article in the Spectator defining the Establishment as a whole class bound together by similarities of outlook, accent, and education. It included such luminaries as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Earl Marshall, and the director general of the BBC, as well as sundry figures associated with the Times newspaper. This Establishment has now been replaced by what Peter Oborne calls the political class. This is a much smaller group - he estimates five to ten thousand - who are not backed by a hinterland of non-political people such as businessmen, landowners, trade unionists and professionals, as the old was. It is drawn from a very narrow circle whose main experience tends to be in public relations, management consultancy, spin doctoring of one kind or another, or the media. You will be hard put to find many members who have had a genuine non-political job. It is largely self selecting. To enter it helps to be reasonably bright but not too brilliant. It also helps, but is not essential, to have a degree from Oxford in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, with the emphasis on the first. But as with the old Establishment, the essential qualification is disinclination to rock the boat. He might have made even more of the cult of the management consultant, which has served to blur the distinction between politics and business and which revels in so-called Powerpoints - vacuous slogans projected on a screen before a gaping audience. Like all broad brush pictures, this glosses over individual exceptions. Ed Balls, for instance, could get a job as an economist any time he likes. But by and large it is convincing. This class obviously achieved its triumph under Tony Blair. But Oborne avoids the mistake of making the book just an attack on the former prime minister. David Cameron's Tories belong to it too and many of them do not hide their admiration for Blair's former political hitman, Alistair Campbell. Oborne has fun describing the uniform way in which the political class eat, drink, dress and spend their leisure. Their only "friends" tend to be political and need to be put in quotation marks. In place of principle they have promoted what a recent cabinet secretary, Andrew Turnbull, has called "delivery". The main unifying belief is the slogan of "modernisation", which rests on a confusion between improvement and change, which the latter does not always bring. The word "new" appeared 609 times in 53 speeches made by Blair over two years. Oborne gives credit to Gordon Brown for some reforms but fears that the present prime minister is too embedded in the system to make a fundamental difference. He shows in some detail that this new class is adept at feathering its own nest financially. Even so I would not advise a young person whose primary goal is financial to go into politics. The real harm of the new political class is its deliberate emasculation of nearly all the institutions and procedures, ranging from the judiciary to the monarchy, parliament and the Civil Service, which can curb what Lord Hailsham once called elective dictatorship. On the surface Crap could not be a more different book. Its title could not be translated into standard southern English in a family newspaper. But open it almost at random and you will find a withering analysis of most government exhortations, plans and pledges, putting into simple English the analysis of the American Public Choice school of political economists. The author falls down however by boasting that he never votes as he has no chance of influencing what happens. He confuses here the rational voter theorem, which states that a self-interested egoist has no incentive to vote, with a more general cynicism about politics and policies It will never be a pleasure to get into the bad books of any ruling political establishment old or new. The best escape is the classical liberal ideal of a government of laws rather than men and women. This is still best set out in Friedrich Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, published in 1960. (Unfortunately too many of Hayek's professed followers have concentrated on his economics to the neglect of the underlying constitutional philosophy.) Under such a government it will not much matter if a junior minister is a cynical Oxford graduate or a retired businessman or trade unionist. Nor will it matter if he is married to the Lord Chamberlain's niece or the girl around the corner. Oborne himself suggests that sooner or later a British politician will discover a new language to bypass the present political class; but, so far from being a classical liberal, he is unlikely to be a benign figure and may well attempt to use the techniques of manipulative populism to his own purposes. One can only hope that there will still be commentators like Oborne, able to expose what he is doing without having to resort to samizdat.
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