Common People

Who's really in the "new" elite?

A few years ago I started getting messages of congratulation for my book, which was nice but rather confusing as, at that point, I hadn’t written one. After this had happened a couple of times I realised that they’d confused me with Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and thought I was the author of “Class Ceiling”, his study of social mobility in the UK.

This was understandable given we have almost the same name and work on very similar policy areas, but led to any number of baffling conversations, including the time I spent half an hour on the phone to ITV discussing a presentation they wanted me to do for their staff before realising they were looking for the other Sam. Luckily his book (written with Daniel Laurison) is very good. If you’re going to have a doppelganger it’s handy to have a smart one.

Anyway due to being confused with each other we eventually met up and chatted about his next book - “Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite” - written with Aaron Reeves, a professor of sociology at LSE, which is out on the 10th September.

It’s a fascinating and innovative study - and vastly more informative than a number of other books about elites that have emerged in the last few years - so I asked him and Aaron to write a post about it for our readers. Mainly because I knew you’d find it interesting too but a little bit because I wanted to have both our names in the same by-line.

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Common People

During the first TV debate of this year’s election campaign pollster James Johnson handed a thousand viewers a ‘worm’ tracker to monitor their instinctive reactions. In an otherwise tetchy and uneventful hour, one moment elicited a notable bump in Keir Starmer’s favourability. ‘My Dad worked in a factory, he was a toolmaker’, Starmer explained, speaking directly to the camera. ‘We didn’t have a lot of money, and on occasion we were in a position where we couldn’t pay our bills…so I know how that feels’. The worm surged.

A week later at the second leaders debate Starmer told the same origin story. This time the audience audibly groaned. When powerful people successfully convince the general public they’re perfectly ordinary the implications can be powerful. But as this illustrates expressions of ordinariness don’t always land. We also saw this at play when Rishi Sunak – son of a doctor and educated at the elite Winchester College – tried to hark back to his immigrant grandmother to ground himself in a rags-to-riches story in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign. Or more recently when he claimed he ‘went without lots of things’ as a child, including Sky TV. Claiming ordinariness can backfire.

But Starmer and Sunak are not the only influential people to navigate the treacherous terrain of how to tell your backstory. In our new book, Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, we interviewed hundreds of influential people who told us an upward origin story. But like Sunak many of these claims were questionable. When we surveyed over 3000 entrants of Who’s Who - Britain’s longstanding catalogue of ‘influential and noteworthy’ individuals – we found that 43% of those that told us they came from working-class backgrounds had actually grown up in families where their parents did solidly middle-class professional work.

In interviews this played out in subtle ways. Many mentioned some aspects of their upbringing but omitted others. Others downplayed childhood experiences that might signal privilege; they stressed the inexpensive nature of their private schooling, the periods of economic uncertainty their family had faced, or the working-class struggle of their grandparents. There was a sense that instinctively many felt moved to cast their origin in a humble light. One CEO, Mary (not her real name), explained that she had even gone as far as hiding her elite private schooling from colleagues, and had deliberately omitted it from her Who’s Who profile.       

Deflecting privilege is one part of a wider strategy we detected among today’s elite to present themselves as ordinary, regular, and unspectacular. These people generally eschewed their influence, and directly counterposed their meritocratic trajectories with the stuffy aristocratic elites of the past. Claims to ordinariness were also staked via lifestyle. Analysing the changing ‘recreations’ expressed in 70,000 Who’s Who profiles over the last 125 years, our analysis provides a unique window into how elites perform their cultural selves in public (Who’s Who is, after all, fully searchable online).