The Establishment is dead

The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it

Peter Oborne

15 September 2007

It has been replaced by a narrow, self-serving governing elite

It has now evolved two novel methods of communication, both of which estrange its members from the voters they are supposed to represent. The first is the kind of language used when they talk among themselves. This has become arcane, always self-referential, often concerned with the techniques of voter manipulation and relying on the anti-democratic assumption that there are matters which ordinary people are either incapable of understanding, or which it would be too dangerous for them to know.

The language used by modern political leaders when they talk direct to the voters is, however, even less transparent. The emergence of the Political Class has coincided with the use of short but artfully constructed sentences which create in the mind of the hearer the impression of being easy to understand, but which are designed to mislead. These so-called soundbites have become one of the most effective weapons in the hands of the Political Class, used unsparingly by the Tories and Labour alike.

The British Establishment is supposed to have been notoriously prescriptive in matters of dress. However, the sumptuary laws of the Political Class are no more relaxed, and in certain intriguing respects even more formal, than the conventions formerly observed by members of the Establishment. Our political leaders continue to wear suits (and women members of the Political Class almost universally wear the same workplace uniform as high-level business executives). Furthermore, they are notably more smartly turned out than the pre-Political Class generation of leaders. It is only necessary to compare Gordon Brown to Harold Wilson, or David Cameron to Edward Heath, to see that party leaders in the era of the Political Class take far more trouble about personal appearance than the earlier generation. This point becomes clearer still when one examines casual dress. The Political Class, even when not at work, finds it hard to relinquish official sartorial codes.