There is a difficulty in writing about the British ruling class which did not trouble anyone writing about it two hundred years ago. In 1826, the ruling class was happy and more than happy to admit that it existed. Its members possessed titles, estates, parliamentary boroughs, military commissions and an elaborate system of precedence which established, with almost comic precision, where everyone stood in relation to everyone else. They did not maintain that Lord Liverpool had reached his position after an open competition against suitably qualified applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Nor did they pretend that the younger son of an aristocratic family had obtained his commission, living or diplomatic appointment without the assistance of his relations. The system was unequal and frequently corrupt, but it possessed the considerable intellectual advantage of being visible.

The modern British ruling class has dispensed with this embarrassing candour. We are now governed according to a doctrine which insists that inherited status has been abolished, that positions of influence are in principle open to talent, and that the inequalities which remain can therefore be explained largely by differences of merit or educational attainment. There are hereditary peers still wandering about, of course, not to mention an increasingly decrepit monarchy, but these are decorative. The serious business of government has passed to ministers, officials, regulators, corporate executives and the large collection of institutions which surrounds the State without quite belonging to it. Since none of these positions is formally hereditary, we are invited to conclude that hereditary power itself has disappeared.

It has not. What has disappeared is the legal language in which hereditary power once described itself.

This distinction is essential to understanding what we may call the minor elite. I take the expression from a recent discussion on YouTube which attempted to distinguish between those who actually exercise substantial power and the much larger population which inhabits the lower reaches of the same social world. The distinction is useful because political discussion tends to treat elites as though everyone within them were roughly interchangeable. Tony Blair, a junior civil servant, a think-tank researcher and a twenty-four-year-old journalist who happens to have unusually well-connected parents may all be described as members of an elite, although their actual command over events differs considerably. Yet it would be equally misleading to place the junior figures in the same social category as an accountant in Coventry just because their salaries happen to be similar.

The minor elite consists, in the first instance, of the cadet branches of the governing class. These are the children and more distant relations of people already established within politics, administration, finance, the media and the higher reaches of the professions. To them must be added the families which have entered this world during the enormous expansion of the managerial State since the middle of the twentieth century. Not every member is rich. Some are badly paid. Nor need they possess recognisable political power of their own. What distinguishes them is membership of a network within which access to institutions, employment and social protection is distributed in ways that are largely invisible to outsiders.

There is nothing mysterious about this, and certainly no need to imagine a conspiracy. Parents have always tried to help their children. Friends prefer dealing with people they know. Institutions recruit through networks because personal recommendation reduces uncertainty, while people who have spent their lives among the powerful naturally acquire an understanding of how powerful institutions behave. The mistake is not in noticing these ordinary human tendencies. It is in imagining that several generations of them can operate within a comparatively narrow social class without producing consequences for the distribution of power.

The difficulty becomes clearer if we consider what happens to the children of the governing class. An old aristocratic family had recognised solutions to the problem of surplus offspring. The estate might pass principally to one child, while younger sons entered the Army or the Church and daughters married into other families of comparable standing. Modern managerial Britain has no acknowledged equivalent because it officially denies that there is any class whose offspring require accommodating. Nevertheless, the offspring continue to exist, and a society which has greatly expanded its governing apparatus has conveniently created an extraordinary number of places in which they may be accommodated.

The charity sector is particularly useful. So are think tanks, foundations, policy institutes, cultural organisations and the various organisations which now occupy the uncertain territory between political campaigning and administration. The media perform a similar function, as do parts of academia and the more fashionable reaches of corporate public affairs. None of this means that everyone working in these sectors is a member of the minor elite. Most are not. The point is rather that these institutions provide an environment in which people possessing connections but no obvious independent economic function can be maintained within the general orbit of power.

The economics of entry tell us a great deal. Consider journalism. A young person who wishes to become a journalist in London may be required to spend years accepting low wages while acquiring contacts and a reputation. The same problem appears in politics, publishing and parts of the charitable sector. In theory, everyone may apply. In practice, the applicant who must support himself entirely from his wages is competing against someone whose parents can subsidise a flat, absorb periods of unemployment and provide introductions which are worth greatly more than another postgraduate qualification. No discrimination need be written into the rules. Indeed, everyone concerned can congratulate himself on the openness of the recruitment process while the economic conditions surrounding that process perform much of the selection beforehand.

This is one reason why the modern language of meritocracy is so misleading. Meritocracy undoubtedly operates in Britain, and for most of us it operates with increasing severity. The middle-class child must pass examinations and obtain credentials, then demonstrate competence before he can hope to enter a profession. Once employed, he must remain useful because his position depends on the salary attached to it. If he loses the position, he loses much of the status that accompanied it, and his children acquire no automatic claim upon his former place. He may become rich. He may become distinguished. He may even be admitted temporarily into the outer circles of political power. None of these achievements necessarily turns his family into part of the governing class.

The genuine minor elite occupies a different position because employment is not the sole foundation of status. A badly paid researcher whose parents know Cabinet ministers may be socially closer to power than a manufacturer employing five hundred people. If the researcher loses one job, there are people who can help locate another. A period of apparent failure need not be disastrous because family resources can absorb it. More importantly, the individual has acquired from childhood the manners and assumptions of the class to which the institutions belong. He does not have to learn how to behave among senior officials or journalists because these people resemble the adults who appeared at his parents’ dinner table.

This explains a phenomenon which is otherwise puzzling. Some members of the minor elite genuinely believe themselves to be ordinary middle-class people. They may earn modest salaries and live in rented accommodation. They know people much richer than themselves and therefore find suggestions of privilege faintly ridiculous. Yet class cannot be reduced to current income. A young woman earning £30,000 while working for a policy institute may possess very little disposable income, but if her father can telephone a newspaper editor and her godfather is a former minister, her poverty is of a peculiar kind. She is poor in cash while rich in options.

The distinction also helps explain the confusion surrounding what is usually called elite overproduction. Britain has certainly produced a vast number of graduates who were encouraged to believe that higher education would carry them into an expanding professional class. The expansion of universities coincided with an expansion of managerial employment, first in government and subsequently throughout the economy. The graduate job became not merely a means of earning money but a certificate of social advancement. An intelligent child was no longer encouraged to become an excellent mechanic or continue the family business. Success meant entering administration, management or one of the professions.

There is an obvious mathematical difficulty here. A society can expand the number of managers much more easily than it can expand the number of people possessing meaningful authority. It can also print degrees more easily than it can create occupations whose economic value justifies the expectations attached to those degrees. The result is not so much the overproduction of elites as the overproduction of people who have been educated to expect elite status. They possess the qualifications which the official ideology told them were necessary, but they eventually discover that the qualifications provide admission only to the competition for the outer offices.

This aspiring class should not be confused with the minor elite itself. Indeed, its members are often the people most ruthlessly exploited by elite institutions. They accept low salaries because the work is prestigious. They perform the research, arrange the conferences and draft the documents because proximity to power feels like participation in power. Their employers can demand ideological conformity with unusual effectiveness because the employee’s status depends upon remaining within the institution. The bargain is psychologically attractive: one may not possess much money or authority, but at least one is not one of the people outside.

The misfortune is that the outsider often believes he is climbing a ladder when he is actually providing services to people who were born several floors above him. He may imitate their opinions and cultivate their social habits. He may spend years making himself useful. Occasionally someone will indeed be admitted further into the system, because no ruling class can function without recruiting talent from outside. But the existence of exceptional recruitment does not prove that the class itself is meritocratic. The Ottoman court recruited talented outsiders with considerable enthusiasm. Nobody therefore describes the Ottoman Empire as an open society.

The structure becomes still more interesting when we examine modern philanthropy. We are repeatedly told that the very rich are abandoning the principle of inheritance. A billionaire announces that most of his fortune will be given away rather than left directly to his children, and this is reported as evidence that even the wealthy now accept the moral case against hereditary privilege. Sometimes this may be what happens. But the institutional form of the gift matters more than the announcement.

A fortune transferred to a foundation has ceased to be the personal property of the founder’s children, but it has not necessarily ceased to be a source of family influence. If descendants become trustees or executives, the foundation may provide them with employment and a recognised social function. It also preserves a network of patronage which can survive long after an ordinary commercial fortune might have been divided between heirs or dissipated by taxation. The son who does not inherit £100 million may find himself associated with an institution controlling £100 million, and the moral distinction between these arrangements is greater than the sociological one.

Here the modern foundation begins to resemble the old estate in an unexpected way. The estate once provided an income while giving its owner a recognised position within the county. The foundation provides institutional standing and a means of supporting associates. Better still, it operates beneath the moral protection of philanthropy. To criticise inherited wealth is progressive; to criticise charitable foundations sounds mean-spirited. A most effective arrangement has therefore emerged in which the hereditary principle can survive under the language of its own abolition.

The relationship between these organisations and the State makes the arrangement more important still. British government increasingly operates through a surrounding ecology of charities and pressure groups. Government departments consult organisations which may themselves receive government money. Those organisations produce research which supports further government action, while personnel circulate between the organisations and the administrative State. None of the participants need behave dishonestly. Each individual transaction may be perfectly defensible. Yet the cumulative result is a system in which public money helps maintain a class of institutions that then provides government with intellectual justification for expanding the activities from which those institutions derive their importance.

This is why it is inadequate to describe NGOs and think tanks simply as pressure groups. They are also mechanisms of social reproduction. They provide places for members of the minor elite, but they perform another function by identifying outsiders who can safely be recruited. The clever graduate who enters at the bottom may possess none of the necessary family connections, but he can demonstrate reliability. If he proves useful and accepts the assumptions of the institution, he may advance. His position nevertheless remains different from that of the person for whom the institution is merely one station in a network established before either of them arrived.

The distinction is between employment and membership. This is also why an apparently unsuccessful member of the governing world can possess more durable status than a successful outsider. A minister may lose office and move into a foundation. A journalist may disappear into a think tank before returning to broadcasting. A policy adviser can move into corporate public affairs and later reappear in government. From the outside these movements are presented as separate appointments made by separate organisations. From within, they are the circulation of personnel through institutions occupying the same social ecosystem.

Once this is understood, the supposed conflict between meritocracy and nepotism looks rather different. Modern Britain has not chosen one and rejected the other. It has imposed meritocracy most rigorously upon those outside the governing class while allowing something much closer to hereditary patronage to operate within it. The outsider must accumulate qualifications because qualifications are the recognised currency with which he purchases the possibility of entry. The insider possesses another currency: trust. Since governing institutions value loyalty as well as competence, this second currency is often the more valuable.

Again, this should not surprise us. No ruling class in history has survived by selecting its members solely through examinations. Power requires relationships of confidence, and people entrusted with power naturally prefer associates whose behaviour they believe they can predict. The absurdity lies in pretending that this elementary fact of political organisation ceased to exist when Britain abolished most hereditary privileges. We removed the formal mechanism and retained the human behaviour which had created it.

There is a further consequence which deserves more attention. The ideology of social mobility has changed the way we think about ordinary work. The older hierarchical society, whatever its many injustices, had to assume that most people would remain in broadly the same social world into which they were born. The political question was therefore how tolerable or prosperous that world could be made. Modern meritocracy offers a different promise. The intelligent child of the mechanic need not become a mechanic. He can obtain a degree and escape into professional employment.

For the individual who succeeds, this may be excellent advice. As a general theory of society, it is disastrous. We continue to require mechanics regardless of how many people attend university. We require builders and drivers, just as we require farmers. A civilisation cannot convert the whole population into policy advisers, nor would there be any reason to wish it could. Yet once upward mobility becomes the principal measure of social success, remaining within a productive occupation acquires the appearance of failure. Instead of asking how the mechanic can become richer and more independent as a mechanic, we ask how his children can be prevented from becoming mechanics at all.

The expansion of managerial employment has concealed this problem for several decades. New titles can be manufactured almost without limit. Someone who once supervised a small office becomes a manager; management itself divides into further levels, while every large institution acquires departments whose principal function appears to be communication with other departments. This creates an illusion that the social pyramid is broadening at the top. In reality, much of what has expanded is not power but the administration of power.

The people occupying these positions may be better paid than manual workers, but their independence is often limited. A salary of £100,000 sounds impressive until one considers the mortgage required to live within commuting distance of London, the costs associated with maintaining a professional household and the dependence upon continued employment. Such a person may be prosperous, but prosperity should not be confused with power. He cannot normally alter public policy. He has no institutional apparatus devoted to advancing his interests, and his children cannot inherit his salary. His economic position may be superior to that of most people while his relationship to the governing system remains fundamentally subordinate.

The minor elite is important because it occupies the boundary at which this distinction becomes blurred. Its members may possess neither enormous wealth nor important office, yet they belong to the social world from which officeholders are selected and into which they return. They provide the staffing of institutions through which the governing class explains itself to the country. They also form the audience before which much of official political argument is conducted. A policy which appears absurd to the ordinary voter may seem perfectly reasonable inside this world because everyone involved has been educated within similar institutions and encounters the same arguments from people whose judgement he respects.

This does not mean that the minor elite agrees about everything. Ruling classes never do. There are ideological disputes and personal hatreds within the British establishment, some of them genuine. What matters is the existence beneath these disagreements of a shared institutional world. A Labour policy researcher and a Conservative think-tanker may despise each other’s programmes while agreeing about the organisations that count, the qualifications that signify seriousness and the kinds of people whose opinions deserve attention. Their disagreements occur inside a common structure.

This is why attempts by political outsiders to capture the system simply by entering its institutions so often end badly. They assume that the institution is neutral equipment which can be operated for different purposes once the correct people acquire the controls. But institutions contain networks, incentives and habits which long predate the arrival of any individual. The outsider who enters a prestigious think tank intending to change politics may discover that the first requirement of advancement is learning which conclusions the think tank regards as respectable. By the time he has acquired sufficient standing to influence the institution, the institution may have done more to him than he has done to it.

None of this requires us to romanticise the aristocratic order which preceded the managerial one. The old ruling class defended privileges which no libertarian should wish restored merely because the present arrangements are objectionable. But the comparison does expose one advantage possessed by the older system: everyone could see it. The aristocrat did not require a sociologist to discover that he was an aristocrat. His house, title and legal privileges announced the fact.

The modern ruling class is harder to oppose because it is harder to describe. Its members can sincerely deny belonging to it. They are merely journalists, researchers, charity executives or public servants. Their children merely happened to obtain internships in the same institutions. Their friends merely happened to recommend them. Their foundations are merely doing good works. At every stage the individual explanation may be true, while the aggregate effect remains the reproduction of a class.

This, I think, is the most useful insight contained in the idea of the minor elite. Britain did not abolish hierarchy during the twentieth century because hierarchy cannot be abolished by legislation. What it abolished was an explicit system of hierarchy and the reciprocal language that accompanied it. In its place grew a managerial order which claims to select by merit while reproducing itself through relationships which merit alone cannot explain.

The resulting arrangement is highly convenient for those who benefit from it. They retain much of the continuity which every governing class desires while avoiding the ideological embarrassment of admitting that continuity exists. Everyone else is encouraged to compete ever more fiercely for credentials and appointments in the belief that the summit is open to anyone sufficiently talented to reach it. A few do reach it, which keeps the promise credible. Many more spend their careers in the managerial foothills, close enough to power to mistake reflected status for possession of the thing itself.

The old aristocracy built walls around its estates. The new governing class has done something cleverer. It has removed the walls from the official map. The roads appear to lead everywhere, the vacancies are advertised and the application forms assure us that all suitably qualified candidates will receive equal consideration. Only after travelling for some distance does the outsider begin to notice that certain people never seem to need the map, and that the doors which he has spent his life trying to open are the doors through which they have been walking since childhood.