Democracy Needs Aristocracy

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Peregrine Worsthorne. Democracy Needs Aristocracy

CONTENTS

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

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DEMOCRACY NEEDS

PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

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Tocqueville’s was a down-to-earth utilitarian justification for aristocracy – ‘that it worked’. In France, where aristocracy had been degraded by the French monarchy, aristocracy led to revolution; in England, where the aristocracy had degraded the monarchy, aristocracy led to order and justice. The English aristocracy, he wrote, ‘is perhaps the most liberal that ever existed and no body of men has ever uninterruptedly furnished so many honourable and enlightened individuals for the government of a country’.

In the light of what we now think we know about the lamentable state of the English ruling class in the 1920s and 1930s, Tocqueville’s idealistic assumption about its merits may indeed seem quite ludicrously out of date. Certainly today’s conventional wisdom has it that the golden chivalry of England was all mown down while leading their men into battle in the Great War, leaving only the dross behind. Nobody who has read the socialite Chips Channon’s interwar diaries, which give a picture of hedonistic irresponsibility and self-indulgence in high places of almost Nerolike proportions, would be inclined to doubt this; and Evelyn Waugh’s famous interwar novel Vile Bodies confirms that impression. So does Edward VIII’s pathetic abdication, usually portrayed as the prime example of that age’s spirit of irresponsible hedonism. In my recollection, however, that decadent impression is profoundly misleading. For surely, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognize that the truly remarkable aspect of the abdication was not the King’s irresponsible hedonism but the Establishment’s revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne – against his irresponsible hedonism. Both my old Catholic family and my new Norman family circles played prominent parts in this reaction. It was my uncle Edmund Fitzalan, for example, who helped persuade Stanley Baldwin that the King would have to abdicate and my stepfather Montagu Norman who exercised the same kind of pressure – not that he actually needed much pressure – on Neville Chamberlain. If one wants an example of how a well-functioning Establishment can serve the public interest, the despatch of Edward VIII provides it in spades. But that is only one small illustration of how, in my recollection, the achievements of the governing class in the 1920s and 1930s, at any rate on the home front, have not yet received their fair share of acclamation.

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