How does Shils's searchlight illuminate the scene today? More than half a century later, the ethos of the British elite was superficially not so very different from that of its Fifties predecessors. They still liked continental holidays, good food and fine wines, revelled in TV adaptations of Jane Austen and worshipped the academic celebrities who could transport them into a sensationalised, sentimentalised and sanitised past. But these similarities were shallow: at a deeper level, new attitudes now dominated. Birds and flowers were now only of interest if they were endangered, and nature had in any case been subsumed into the new secular religion of environmentalism. "Cultivating personal relations" had by the early 21st century acquired a sexual connotation. In its abandonment of any semblance of moral restraint or discretion, the British elite no longer even pretended to set an example to the rest. The most striking aspect of the new ethos was, in fact, its spongiform amorality. It was a profoundly unethical ethos, the ethos of an exclusive liberal elite, sustained by the public purse. The new intellectual class of the Fifties had atrophied into a caste.
Finding itself the victim of the greatest debauch of the public finances in British history ("I'm afraid to tell you the money's run out," wrote Labour's Chief Secretary to his successor), the country may well conclude that intellectuals are the least of its problems. But there is a real danger that the new coalition will overlook the urgent need to restore the ladders of aspiration that have been wilfully kicked away since the 1960s. Fortunately, some of the best brains in British politics now have their hands on the levers of social mobility: Michael Gove (on the board of Standpoint), David Willetts and Oliver Letwin (both contributors), and Iain Duncan Smith all share a commitment to recreating an educated elite worthy of the name. Frank Field (also on our board) says he would "like to pick up the conversation so rudely interrupted 12 years ago" when he was sacked as Minister for Welfare Reform at the instigation of Gordon Brown.
At the time of the Coronation, there was talk of a New Elizabethan age. As Shils dryly observed, it "petered out into thin air". British intellectual life today is no more worthy of comparison with the Elizabethan age than it was in the Fifties. But raising the sights of the young was not an ignoble ambition then; still less now.
