Oxford has always offered sanctuary to the socially maladjusted and chronically ill-at-ease. At first glance, Emerald Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, might be an attempt to dramatise the resulting long-lived demographic tension of undergraduate life: the modus vivendi that must be established between those who effortlessly belong and those who find they can’t. Fennell is herself the Oxford-educated daughter of a multi-millionaire London jeweller, perhaps giving some indication of which side of the university’s social binary might have claimed her allegiance. Much like her first film, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is propelled along by an enjoyable, rather unhinged, spirit of social paranoia. It is a film that is rather evidently entertained by itself and its own excesses. In fact, the film is so enjoyable that many of the curious errors and misconceptions that underscore its depiction of Oxford undergraduate life occur to one only as afterthoughts.

The film’s elevator-pitch is simple enough: the psychodrama of The Talented Mr Ripley imposed on the charmed setting of Brideshead Revisited. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is gormless and poor; Felix (Jacob Erlordi) is gorgeous and rich; both are first-years at Brasenose. After a few run-ins, Felix generously befriends Oliver, many rungs his social inferior, and invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s country seat. Ripley-style, Oliver is revealed to be in the grip of an opaque desire at once to pursue, destroy, and in some sense become Felix, the object of his dark obsession.

He embeds himself in Felix’s life like a parasite, his fascination all the creepier for having a sexual dimension while lacking any straightforward sexual explanation. In one scene, having spied Felix masturbating in their shared bathroom through a crack in the door, Oliver waits for him to leave, then climbs into the tub and sucks the inseminated water out of the drain. But worse than this — much, much worse — is that Oliver is later discovered by Felix to have lied about his social background. He is not in fact working class, but a middle-class person engaging in “oppression cosplay”: a very Oxford touch. Fennell has correctly noticed that among today’s undergraduates, misleadingly playing down one’s privileged background might well be a more profitable form of social camouflage than playing it up.

That aside, the more one thinks about the fast-blossoming relationship between Oliver and Felix in the first act, the less sense it makes. Why exactly does Felix allow Oliver to penetrate his life to the degree that he does? Pity — the explanation the film seems to want the viewer to accept — is, as Oliver must know, not a very promising model for manipulation within the socially ruthless undergraduate circles in which Felix seamlessly moves. There are half-hearted attempts to suggest that the frisson of playing the role of saviour, or perhaps an acquired taste for the exoticism of poverty, might motivate Felix’s adoption of Oliver. (“I can see why Felix likes you,” his sister tells Oliver when meeting him — Yes? Please tell us! the viewer thinks — “you’re so… real”). But none of those interpretations of Felix’s motivations can be properly sustained for the reason that Felix, perhaps against the grain of our expectation, turns out to be consistently decent, sane and straightforward.

For similar reasons, it isn’t at all clear why Felix’s family seem so desperate for Oliver to stick around at Saltburn once he’s been invited up. Likely explanations as to why this berth might be made available to him — for instance, that Oliver is a sparkling conversationalist or accomplished social performer — are ruled-out by the film’s premise. Were he to have these qualities, Oliver wouldn’t have needed to trick Felix into friendship in the manner in which he turns out to have done. In general, the film suffers from a kind of uncertainty about how attractive a figure Oliver is supposed to be. He manipulates boldly but haphazardly, leaving the viewer wondering whether anyone capable of even occasionally pulling off the feats of seduction and role-playing he sometimes succeeds in would really be stuck in such a social rut to begin with.

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If the degree to which Oliver succeeds at Saltburn is under-explained, the degree to which he fails to at Oxford is more so. In his first few days as a fresher, Oliver is mocked by his tutor for having read all the books on his reading list, and at dinner is shown to be a solitary loner adrift in a sea of convivial, urbane and already intimately acquainted others. The message seems to be that he is an isolated loser. But as anyone who has been there will know, and anyone who hasn’t should be able to guess, there are in fact countless Oliver Quicks at Oxford. For the most part they are fully-integrated, albeit lame, members of the community. Oliver would fit right in!

A conscientious but neurotic loner, the prototypical Oliver is probably a PPE-ist (rather than an English student, as Fennell imagines). He types away loudly in lectures and pulls a reliable 9 to 5 at his favourite desk in the college library; he may have been liberated by student life to the degree of making some inadvisable fashion choices and has perhaps even got a daring earring, all the while holding his underwhelming personality fixed. He goes on a few forgettable nights-out a term, prizes the limited social recognition he receives on the basis of fulfilling some thankless administrative role like being JCR secretary, and spends most of his evenings cooking enormously elaborate meals with his boring girlfriend in the staircase kitchenette. I encountered Oliver dozens of times at Oxford.

Saltburn may of course not intend to draw any deeper moral about Oxford’s social scene. Few of the satiric touches in the film seem to be operating in the service of a wider background political theory. Of course, that aim — to make a film about social inequality at Oxford which is just fun — may strike some as subversive enough in its own right. All the same, any film that did aspire to be a credible satire of contemporary Oxford would have to reckon with the fact that Oliver is not now, nor likely ever was, the canonical villain of undergraduate life. At best, he is a hapless accomplice. The real baddies are a subtly different social type.

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Generations turn over quickly at Oxford, and the spirit of the age changes with them. It didn’t take me and my contemporaries long to notice that, in the latter half of the 2010s, we had contrived to come up at a time when a detectable atmosphere of lameness hung about the place. This was doubtless true of other universities too, though the combination of Oxford’s fragmented and parochial institutional structure, as well as the high concentration of intelligent weirdos, seemed to amplify its effects there. “Lameness” is admittedly a frustratingly non-specific label, but seems the right kind of impressionistic diagnosis to get some traction on the problem. It was after all often a little tricky to put one’s finger on what lay at the root of this lameness, though the dispositions and reactions associated with it were quite obviously expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.

It wasn’t, to be clear, just that there were a number of visible malcontents in the social mix — that, I had obviously been fully prepared for — but that, somehow, they seemed to be in charge, and moreover ruling by consent. Everyday college life was kept in check by their many wildly unpredictable and exquisitely-honed sensitivities; a casuistry of safetyism provided the method by which almost all communal decisions were taken. The mood was censorious, retributive, and moralistic. The de rigueur attitude was a kind of performative insecurity, though lapsing into this mode was often nothing more than an implicit double-bluff: a way of announcing one belonged by insisting that one didn’t.

An extraordinary coup had clearly taken place at some point, comparably diabolical to the one which Oliver pulls off. Many of those in power behaved with a kind of wounded officiousness that suggested they had been bullied too much at school, or perhaps not enough. Now, as if taking their cue from certain progressive political causes, they seemed to be attempting to “reclaim” their lameness as something to be celebrated, or at least uncompromisingly imposed on other people.

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Perhaps the most violent outlet for these strange urges was JCR politics, which some of its leading practitioners seemed to conceive of primarily as a mode of social revenge — using it to terrorise their fellow students and police their activities, though invariably under the guise of promoting kindness, the collective mental wellbeing, or some equally sinister objective. In the manner of modern day Lord Chamberlains they would turn up to the university theatres and hammer lists of trigger warnings to the doors; satirical college magazines were shut down; each term brought with it a cause of outrange more unimportant than the last. The rule seemed to be that no gripe could be too manifestly unserious to fail to count as a veto on any collective enterprise. It was often difficult to know how far to be amused and how far disturbed by the strange ascendant mood.

A shrewd choice to simply side-step these unwieldy contemporary developments may be why Saltburn is set in 2006: long enough ago that recent history’s political and technological trends hadn’t had a chance to warp the character of campus politics, though still recent enough to pass for the present in certain crucial respects. Still, the effect is to trap the film with a somewhat ersatz image of Oxford — the dreamy crane shots over the Rad Cam, the oddly managed homoeroticism, the remote aristocratic estates. The view from the dreaming spires manages to not quite bring into focus certain notable developments on the ground.

As a result, and whatever its other successes, Saltburn fails to skewer what is distinctively worth skewering in undergraduate life today. It’s a shame, as that would be well worth doing. Undergraduate life is funny, even though it takes itself seriously. Some properly trained derision would reveal its excess self-seriousness to be compensating for a gross lack of seriousness; its overweening moralism disguising an untoward parochialism; the pretence of imposter syndrome concealing the existence of the real imposters.

You have to love the fairytale serendipity of that backstory: one chance encounter and a life is changed — but another kind feels increasingly common. While watching Normal People, I looked up Daisy Edgar-Jones and learned that she was the privately-educated daughter of a film editor and the former head of entertainment at Sky. Does that make her performance any less impressive? Not a jot. But it does make her a nepotism baby.

Back in February, a young Euphoria fan called Meriem Darradji tweeted: “Wait I just found out that the actress that plays Lexie is a nepotism baby omg [crying emoji]. Her mom is Leslie Mann and her dad is a movie director lol.” Darradji’s surprise was surprising. Apatow has a distinctive surname and five of her seven big-screen credits are in movies directed by her dad, so she’s hardly working undercover. Still, the phrase took off with TikTok users, who quickly improvised a taxonomy of nepotism — actors with wealthy, well-connected parents are less suspect than those with bona fide movie stars in the family for example. Some said how disappointing it was to click on the Wikipedia page of a hot young newcomer and see that their parents already had their own blue-linked entries, while others were enthralled by this Hollywood quasi-aristocracy.

Whether the phrase is contemptuous, affectionate or ambivalent depends on who’s using it but, as the softness of the word baby implies, the tone is usually more playful than angry. It’s an amusing way to interrogate privilege, inequality, the limits to social mobility and the promise of meritocracy. Nepotism, which entered English from the Italian in the 17th century, isn’t quite the right word for this phenomenon. It strictly means favouring one’s relatives with privileged positions, which is easy to achieve in business and politics but less so in an industry where employment is episodic and unpredictable. You couldn’t make Succession about a family of actors because there is no glittering prize to bestow on a favoured son or daughter. The advantages that second-generation celebrities enjoy are more nebulous. Connections, of course. A familiarity with how things work, from film sets to the paparazzi. And, let’s be honest, genes: beautiful people make beautiful people. (Exhibit A: Zoe Kravitz.)

No industry, therefore, has as many nepotism babies as modelling, where the likes of Lila Moss, Kaia Gerber, Iris Law and the Hadid siblings make the old tradition of scouts plucking gorgeous unknowns from provincial shopping centres seem quaint. Conversely, musical talent does not seem to be hereditary; very few major artists have famous parents. In fact, as Julian Lennon or Jakob Dylan will tell you, there is such violent suspicion of anyone seen to be trading on a famous surname that failure is more likely than not.

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Acting, a field in which looks and charisma go a long way but aren’t enough on their own, falls somewhere in between. Hollywood has always been a place where the American dream could seem like more than spin. As the title of his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, indicates, Kirk Douglas literally went from rags to riches. Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes and orphanages. “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house,” she said. “When I heard that this was acting, I said that’s what I want to be. You can play.”

At the same time, it was an industry where dynasties mattered: the Barrymores, the Hustons, the Fondas. Liza Minnelli, Carrie Fisher, Jamie Lee Curtis and Isabella Rossellini all had at least one very famous parent. No doubt it is easier to get a break if you’re the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher but many of these celebrity scions felt anxiety about their privilege and how it was perceived. Nicolas Cage changed his surname from Coppola to avert suspicion of favouritism and begged interviewers not to mention the fact that his uncle directed The Godfather.

“I’m really a product of nepotism,” Jeff Bridges once told me. “I was literally carried onto a film set when I was six months old… Usually one of the hardest things is getting your foot in the door so that was kind of handled. But I had to prove to myself that I didn’t get the job because of whose son I was — that I had some real talent. It took a few years for me to say, oh, OK, I guess I have some value of my own.” Of course, Bridges went on to have a far more substantial career than both his father Lloyd, who is best remembered for the Airplane! movies, and his brother Beau, which suggests that ultimately it’s the work that counts. That takes time though.

It was a while before it became obvious that Ben Stiller or Michael Douglas were stars in their own right. “As the child of someone, you get access other people don’t have, so the playing field is not level in that way,” Gwyneth Paltrow (daughter of Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow) recently explained to model Hailey Bieber (daughter of Stephen Baldwin). “However, I really do feel that once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good because people are ready to pull you down and say… ‘You are only there because of your dad or your mum.’” The phrasing is typically tone-deaf — are other actors half as good and working half as hard? — but Paltrow earned her place. Like Stiller and Bridges, she eclipsed her parents.

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Nepotism babies inspire ambivalence because most of them are clearly talented and apparently charming. A list of the most interesting young actors around would include Dakota Johnson, Margaret Qualley, John David Washington, Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keough. Even those whose unusually prestigious debuts would appear to scream nepotism — Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper in Licorice Pizza; James Gandolfini’s son Michael playing the young Tony Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark — garnered great reviews across the board.

Perhaps the only really glaring case of unearned familial privilege is Brooklyn Beckham, who is true celebrity royalty in the sense that he has nothing to offer except his bloodline. Fame is both his birthright and, in lieu of discernible talent, his job. The smart ones are honest about their advantages. “I think I’ll get a couple chances on their name and then if I suck, I’ll get kicked out of the kingdom,” Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) told People. “And that’s what should happen.”

This new fascination with nepotism reminds me of the fuss, a decade ago, about old Etonian or Harrovian actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne. They were obviously gifted, and nobody seriously believed that the headmaster of Eton could phone a movie director and secure a plum role as easily as a starter job in the City. Yet there were so many of them, all at once, that something smelled off. Individuals became lightning rods for a broader concern that the game — meaning society rather than Hollywood — was rigged.

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That debate came in the wake of the financial crisis and the Occupy movement. Talk of nepotism babies coincides with another wave of economic anxiety and heightened awareness of inequality. Yet the conversation is for the most part refreshingly clear-eyed, curious and nuanced. It’s not the individual that matters; it’s the ecosystem. If there is still diversity of experience and opportunity, and most actors haven’t grown up in the industry, then a nepotism baby is an object of curiosity rather than a systemic problem. There is a healthy sense of perspective, too. As long as people like Eric Trump exist, one can’t get too het up about Maude Apatow.

I think that Bridges and Paltrow are right to suggest that Hollywood is not a meritocracy in the short term but becomes more so in the long term. Talent outlives good fortune. The perfect test case is Sofia Coppola, who experienced what you might call a nepotism baby do-over. After Winona Ryder dropped out of The Godfather Part III, Francis Ford Coppola cast 18-year-old Sofia as Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. She bombed. On top of her lousy screen presence, the impression that the role was entirely undeserved inspired such brutal reviews that she gave up acting all together. “I didn’t realise how much pressure I would be under — people want to see Francis’s daughter fall on her face,” she told Entertainment Weekly. A decade later, though, she directed The Virgin Suicides, a debut so confident, distinctive and unbeholden to her father that she could start again. You can’t help noticing that all of her films have been about the privileged and unhappy.

At this particular party, with guests still reeling from Trump’s victory, a professor at an Ivy League university began expounding on the flaws with American democracy — an outdated “18th-century technology” in our digital present. In a world of Russian Facebook ads and Cambridge Analytica, why put our faith in democratic processes? The winner gets the nuclear codes. Should we really leave it up to the manipulable US public? It’s nice giving everyone a vote, but so what? One individual’s vote among millions has little meaning. We need a better system, not sentimental ideas about the inherent value of voting.

Outdated 18th-century man that I am, I was outraged less by his arguments than by his underlying attitude, the blithe aristocratic assumption that democratic outcomes tell us nothing we need know, or nothing other than the hateful stupidity of American voters. That a better class of people should be in charge, the stakes being too high for such decisions to be left to the sorts of people… well… bringing our food in and our empty plates out of the dining room.

As Gordon Wood has noted, the American Revolution was not simply a matter of political change. It entailed a social revolution as well, emphasising equality as a social principle, undermining long-held hierarchies, and promoting an attitude of greater respect for ordinary men. Such attitudes are not always natural. The siren song of hierarchy, power, and authority captivates us even when we’re not recoiling from the monstrosities of populism. And if one would like to observe such attitudes at their most subtle and seductive, one of the best and most elegantly written books from such a perspective is George Kennan’s celebrated Sketches from a Life.

These are the assembled travel writings and letters written from 1927 to 1989 by George Kennan, diplomat and historian, key architect of Cold War containment and the Marshall Plan, a brilliant analyst and a beautiful writer, and an American patriot who long advocated for a less bellicose, less militarist, less hubristic foreign policy. ‘‘George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history,’’ said Henry Kissinger. It’s a marvellous book, with passages of such elegance and insight I was constantly photographing them and sending them to friends. It also filled me with the same outrage I’d felt at that dinner party.

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Those who have read Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan’s political and philosophical manifesto, will know some of the man’s oddities: his hatred of the automobile, his desire to split up America into 12 constituent republics, his belief that widespread use of domestic servants is essential for cultural health. And those familiar with the more unsavoury bits of his biography will know about his speculations that black and naturalised citizens should not be allowed to vote, about his self-declared “soft spot” for apartheid, about his State Department memo (that Dean Acheson refused to circulate) that partly blamed miscegenation for Latin America’s political troubles.

But it is in Sketches from a Life that we get his vision, most clearly and seductively, at the level of sensibility. And likewise, it is where we get almost unbidden notes of American optimism and egalitarianism occasionally polluting that vision. And so, rather than a sourcebook from “one of the wisest men in America” (as the New York Times put it when reviewing the book in 1989), this is a book best revisited as if it were a novel about a tragically limited, albeit brilliant, man who spent his life in service to a country whose spirit was at odds with his own.

Early on in Sketches, we learn that Kennan, 23 years old but already nostalgic for an imagined past, regrets not having been born 100 years earlier:

“Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches — they are too common. I should like to have lived in the days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshipping.”

“Such beautiful bullshit,” I wrote in the margins. Kennan was born in 1904, so one wonders which wars he was thinking of (America’s Indian Wars? 1824’s First Anglo-Burmese War? The French Conquest of Algeria?), but specificity here isn’t the thing so much as getting wrapped up in the myth-making power of your own prose.

Indeed, the book is haunted by visions of a perfect past where suffering was justified by higher ideals. In St. Petersburg he notes that the Imperial Yacht Club, once the haunt of dukes, diplomats, and dignitaries, had been turned into a state administration building for internal waterways. He laments the loss of an old playground for the rich: did it not “actually add something of colour and variety to the city for the people of that day to know that here, in these premises, there was being prepared, even if they didn’t eat it, some of the finest food eaten anywhere in northern Europe, that here things were being done elegantly, impressively, to the connoisseur’s taste?”

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Monarchy gets a similar justification, since the trappings of monarchy are “the dream, the vision, the ideal of man as he might conceivably be — of man ennobled”, a theatre without which Europe supposedly couldn’t have produced “good taste”. Elsewhere he declares that men require “a moral order drawn up by those who are wiser and more experienced than the great masses of humanity and are capable of channelling into the body of spiritual law the ponderous experience of millennia of human progress”.

These beautiful visions of a refined world propped up by an impoverished populace are contrasted with Kennan’s disgusted reactions to widespread prosperity. In Scandinavia he sees, or thinks he sees, “the intellectual and spiritual vacuum which the European welfare state produces”. This happens when “the sacrifice of an attractive and gracious form of living on the part of a few is rationalised by the same arguments about better conditions for the many”. And in America, he speculates that when man is given “freedom both from political restraint and from want, the effect is to render him childlike”. In one of his more amusing asides, he compares California to “the popular American Protestant concept of heaven” since:

“There is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many — not all — of one’s friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating each other over the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realise that now — the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant — nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again.”

There are some poignant moments, especially during and in the wake of Second World War, when he sees the faces of refugees, or the sites of mass slaughter. In the ruins of Hamburg, he’s struck by the conviction that no military calculus “could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values”. On the border of Finland and Russia, he sketches a picture of birch trees growing above “the remains of some boy — be he Russian or Finnish — who gave up on this spot the privilege of leading a life through, like the rest of us, in all its satisfactions and disappointments”. This is the sensibility which spurred Kennan, in 1950, to write a State Department paper calling for an end to the use of nuclear weapons for offensive purposes, since they cannot be “reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying” adversaries, and since “they fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another”.

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Admirable, indeed. Grand suffering clearly moves him. And yet, here too, I find something disturbing. A true humanism would afford common people dignity in life as well as in death. But in Berlin, “the great awesome ruins” of East Berlin stand in judgment of West Berlin, which seems “toylike and trivial: an officious little busybody of a civilisation, fussy and impermanent”. And he cannot look upon a suffering child, a young French girl on a cart, in a torn and soiled dress, with all the youth gone out of her face, without projecting his own notions onto her: “Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love, see how far you get… Do you think she’s going to come out of it a flaming little patriot? She saw the complete moral breakdown and degradation of her own people…”

There are times, though, where the aristocratic lens cracks, and rather than smug if elegantly written dismissals of human beings we get to witness a fine mind grappling with the gap between his perceptions and his ideas about the world. The earliest comes in Hamburg, in 1927, when he encounters a huge Communist demonstration at the Dammtor Station. “For all my contempt for the falseness and hatefulness and demagoguery of communism,” he writes, “I had a strange desire to cry when I first saw those ranks of people marching along the street — ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people.” Kennan being Kennan, he finds them “ignorant, unpleasant people,” but can’t deny the truth of their humanity: “They were after centuries of mute despair, for the first time attempting to express and to assert themselves.”

Later, while Ambassador in Moscow, he leads into powerful reflections on the stability of the communist regime with a set of observations about the hundreds of thousands of garden plots on the outskirts of Moscow. These plots open up for ordinary Russians “a veritable world of what you might call ‘miniature private interest’, a world in which people devote themselves to, and think about, everything under the sun except the success of communism.” Political discontent doesn’t breed in these spaces so much as a “spiritual breach between the rulers and the ruled…”

Here, after so much nostalgia for the old European order, we see Kennan’s Americanness inflecting his vision. What he sees is not anti-communism so much as human life, unruly and unreconciled to ideological systems seeking its suppression. “The Party has tried to rule out change.” he writes, “but the Party is hoisted here on the petard of its own lack of a genuine democracy, of the loss of organic connection with the emotional forces of the people themselves.” Nothing dramatic looms on the horizon, no coming revolt, but the excitement of the revolution has exhausted itself. Human beings, never quite as mouldable as elites imagine, move unexpectedly, uncontrollably, dangerously.

I must confess, I have a certain degree of nostalgia for the world Kennan inhabited. Hard-earned expertise, like the expertise Kennan had about Russia, is not to be scoffed at, the gutting of the State Department over the past decades is one of the America’s great self-inflicted wounds, and a less hubristic, less militaristic foreign policy of the sort he advocated is one I heartily endorse. But though experts have valuable, if partial truths we need to hear, they should be haunted by the notion that those “ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people” might have access to their own partial truths as well.

The Delavals are no longer in residence, though. When the male line died out in 1814, the estate passed through marriage to the Astleys of Melton Constable in Norfolk — holders of the ancient barony of Hastings — and that’s why, as well as working for Edward Delaval Henry Astley, 22nd Baron Hastings, in the gift shop of his stately home, I spent my youth hanging out in Astley Park, collecting glasses in the Astley Arms or waiting for the bus on Astley Road to attend Astley High. (Our school’s local rivals at Ridley High were named for the viscounts who’d turned their Blyth fiefdom into a Victorian boomtown, and whose scion has just stood down from the House of Lords.)

“The feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland,” wrote the sociologist Henry Mess in 1928, and well into the 20th century, half of the county was held in great estates of over 10,000 acres. This was in part a legacy of the way the Far North of England had been governed in the Middle Ages. Being far from the royal centres of power in the South, and on the frontier with the usually hostile Kingdom of Scotland, a caste of Northumbrian warlords (and, uniquely in Durham, a Prince Bishop) were given quasi-royal authority to muster armies, hold courts, and punish disobedience. As Parliament treated the defence of the border as a purely local affair, and never raised any taxes for this purpose, they relied on the few northern magnates and their retainers, whom they compensated by adding barony to barony and office to office — until, by the 14th century, the greater part of England north of the Trent was held by the three great Houses of Neville, Lancaster and Percy.

The greatest of the blue-blooded Northumbrian magnates were the Earls, and later the Dukes, of Northumberland. One history of the House of Percy has noted that in the tumultuous North, the “Southern king’s writ hardly ran. In Percy country, there was Percy law backed by a Percy army paid for by Percy money”. The dynasty began with a Norman knight from Calvados who was granted lands in northern England. In the following centuries the family’s fortunes rose and fell with the vagaries of court politics, but they always had their Northumbrian stronghold at Alnwick Castle, from which they dominated the lands from the Tweed to the Tyne — with the assistance of lower-ranking armigerous families like the Delavals of Seaton.

By the 18th century the male line had died out, and, in an aristocratic sleight of hand, Sir Hugh Smithson — an obscure but wealthy Yorkshire baronet who had married a descendent of the last Percy Earl of Northumberland — assumed the famous surname and was elevated to ducal status. (Marcel Proust was fascinated by the sonority and evocation of high lineage of certain ancient titles and was always delighted when he came upon the name of the Duke of Northumberland, which he thought had a “sort of thunderous quality”.)

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Not all of England’s landed gentry had the good luck to find that their estates contained colossal mineral wealth, and as David Cannadine showed in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, the 20th century saw them lose a generation of sons in the First World War — as well as much of their prosperity, prestige and power, as they were assailed by death duties and democratic politics. It wasn’t long after Lloyd George’s famous speech in Newcastle in 1909 — where he quipped that “a fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror” — that the House of Lords lost its powers of veto over the commons, a key watershed in British history.

But while other great houses struggled to repel these assaults on their privileges, this was not the fate of the Kings of the North. As Henry Mess pointed out, “there is not the sharp divorce between feudalism and the new industrialism which is found in most other areas”. For the vast landholdings of the Percy dukes included some of the richest coalfields in Britain. This made their fortune and saw them take their place in the North East among a new industrial aristocracy of sharp-elbowed “Lords of Coal” — a group so wealthy that at her wedding to the Scots nobleman John Lyon in 1767, Mary Eleanor, the daughter of the Durham coal baron Sir George Bowes, was probably the richest heiress in Europe. The dynasty they founded led directly to the marriage of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York in 1923: Queen Elizabeth II carries the DNA of hard-nosed Tyneside coal-owners.

The Percy family has survived setbacks. When George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn that the “English ruling class are morally fairly sound” because “in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed”, he probably had in mind Lieutenant Alan Percy, the 9th Duke of Northumberland, who, in an odd echo of Harry Hotspur, fell leading a bayonet charge by the Grenadier Guards on the retreat to Dunkirk. The death of the playboy 11th Duke in 1995 after an amphetamine overdose was another blow. But the Percys endured by diversifying their coal wealth into a vast property portfolio, which has secured their place in the Sunday Times Rich List ever since.

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By Dan Jackson

Certainly in comparison to, say, the Australian-born 13th Duke of Manchester, who was jailed for burglary in Las Vegas in 2016, the Percy family maintains a certain Edwardian grandeur, with their great castle in the country and Syon House, opposite Kew Gardens: a luxurious seat in the capital. Indeed, few places could match the Ruritanian splendour of Lady Melissa Percy’s marriage in 2013 when she travelled with her father Ralph (“Rafe”), the 12th Duke, through Alnwick with a retinue of liveried footmen in the yellow state coach that had carried the 3rd Duke of Northumberland to the coronation of the Bourbon King Charles X in Reims in 1825.

The Percy family still maintains a visible presence in the public life of the region. Among other patronages, the Duke of Northumberland is the President of the Charitable Community Foundation, and his wife is the Lord Lieutenant of the county of which she is the Duchess. There was even a charity football match at St James’ Park in 2007 between the North and South of the region, where star players such as Alan Shearer and Niall Quinn turned out under the respective colours of the Duke of Northumberland and the Earl of Durham to raise money for the Prince’s Trust. But the longevity of Northumbrian aristocrats like the Percys of Alnwick has been a story of adaptability — and alliance.

On Hood Street in Newcastle, just near the Theatre Royal, stands the graceful premises of one of the oldest private members clubs in the world. “The Northern Counties” was founded in 1829 by the nobility and gentry of Northumberland and Durham, and a painting on the Club’s main staircase shows a gathering of red-tailcoated Northumbrian grandees in the Fifties, including the Duke himself, with Viscounts Ridley and Allendale, and Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing (whose son Matthew became, in 2008, the Prince and Grand Master of the Order of Malta) — alongside representatives of the local monied classes who’d gentrified themselves through the coal trade.

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It’s somehow apt, therefore, that the family with the greatest fossil fuel-based wealth of all now has a major presence in the birthplace of carboniferous capitalism. When the Duke of Northumberland’s niece Lucy Cuthbert married the Saudi Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud in 2011, few could’ve predicted that this would foreshadow the purchase of Newcastle United by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia ten years later. And it was striking, too, to observe that at the first match at St James’ Park after the Saudi takeover in October 2021, there in the director’s box next to the club’s new chairman, His Excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan, were representatives of the old and new Geordie aristocracy, as the 5th Viscount Ridley took his place alongside the famous presenting duo (and Ambassadors of the Princes Trust): Anthony McPartland and Declan Donnelly.

As they entered the 21st century, the Percys could justifiably look out from the ramparts of Alnwick Castle with some confidence, knowing that if they face a cashflow problem they can always look down the back of the sofa for a spare Raphael. And yet the deference that they once enjoyed — and expected — is harder to sustain. When the 5th Duke’s tenants gathered for their annual dinner in 1859 they could still state their loyalty to the Percys with unfeigned enthusiasm:

Those relics of the feudal yoke
Still in the north remain unbroke:
That social yoke, with one accord
That binds the peasant to his Lord…

And yet just this year The Times reported a “second peasants revolt” as the citizens of Amble mustered in defiance of the Duke’s plans to build new homes on an area of common land. The relics of feudalism may live on in Northumberland, but the ties of lord and peasant, it seems, have started to fray.

Johnson may not actually have much blue blood in his veins, but he is certainly a toff. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is both the greatest clown in English literature and a knight of the realm. Lord Byron was nobleman, rebel, daredevil, libertine and criminal (he had an incestuous affair with his sister), all of which made him more popular in his day than Billy Connolly is in ours. And though people detest the arrogant kind of patrician, they are ready to give their vote to the kind of high-class eccentric who shambles around with a parrot on his shoulder, even if he lives in Downing Street.

Dukes and Viscounts are powerful in one sense but marginal in another. As marginal figures, they have an affinity with the crook and the nonconformist. The landowner has a soft spot for the poacher, but not much sympathy for the petit-bourgeois gamekeeper. Some aristocrats see life as a game, playing it with one ironic eye on its arbitrary nature. In this, they are like the medieval Fool, who sees that all social roles are reversible, including his own.

The Fool is wiser than the king because he knows he is playing a part, whereas the king takes himself for real. The Fool thus speaks a subversive kind of truth, for which, as in King Lear, he risks being beaten up by his employers. Fools know that they aren’t up to much and so are more canny than their masters, who aren’t up to much but don’t know it. Playing the fool is a matter of playing the fool, making a performance of one’s folly which requires art and intelligence. The wisdom of foolery shows up the foolishness of the wise.

The strength of the clown, then, lies in his weakness. Because he is one of the lowliest forms of social life, he can’t fall any further and thus assumes a strange invulnerability. It is dangerous for ruling classes if the common people have nothing to lose. Fools and clowns are “all-licensed”, as one of Lear’s daughters complains of his jester, but this doesn’t matter much because they have no real power beyond mockery and wordplay. They are free in proportion to their impotence.

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The trouble begins when the jester, like Johnson, is really a king in disguise, falling over his feet as a useful ploy for landing in Downing Street. Shakespeare understands that maintaining a pact with failure and frailty is the only basis for genuine power, which is different from arsing around in order to charm the electorate. The jester plays with the truth in a way which reveals some acute insights, whereas Johnson simply lies through his teeth.

Breaking the rules isn’t always to be censured. Great artists do it all the time. Even if you are a Schoenberg or a Beckett, however, you have to grasp the conventions well enough to sense when you should throw them away. Sometimes it’s the conventions themselves which will tell you this, or allow you to intimate it. You may need a textbook to learn Malay, but you are fluent in the language only when you can put the book aside. You incorporate the rules rather than ignore them, just as you don’t need to make an agonising act of choice every time the little green man, frozen eternally in the act of stepping forward, turns suddenly to red. Doing things without thinking about them is part of social existence. It shouldn’t be confused with not thinking about them because you don’t give a damn.

How do clowns become kings? The clown’s problem is how not to be a cynic. If he pushes his mockery too far he can end up deflating not this or that value, but value as such. All that remains to be believed in is his own ego. Shakespeare’s Iago, who has a touch of the jester about him, is ruthlessly self-interested, just like our dear leader. Like a whimsical monarch, the only reality that exists for the cynic is his own appetites. These can be gratified all the more easily if human life is a game, since if things are insubstantial you can manipulate them better. This applies especially to women. The cynic may not be a rake, but almost all rakes are cynics, convinced that women exist purely for their own pleasure. It isn’t accidental that Boris Johnson is a philanderer.

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Britain is one of those rare nations in which not being serious is thought to be a virtue. Seriousness is for shopkeepers, not for rogues and roués. The middle classes have character, whereas the upper classes are seen as characters. The Roundhead is grim-lipped and high-minded, while the Cavalier makes light of things in order to show his superiority to them. This is the kind of sangfroid which helped to build the Empire, and in the form of a certain slapdash amateurism helped to lose it as well. Giving the debonair Lord Mountbatten a colony to rule over or a battleship to command was like giving a machine gun to a gorilla. The word ’amateurism’ means doing things because you love to, not because you have to. Check-out assistants have to turn in for work each morning, but gentleman farmers occasionally heave calves into land rovers because they rather fancy the idea of mucking in.

As the oldest capitalist nation in the world, Britain has long been a breeding ground for individualism. Each individual is a quirky deviation from the norm, in which case there isn’t really a norm in at all. Everybody, like Dickens’s grotesque figures, is a law unto themselves, which means that the law doesn’t exist and society is essentially anarchic. The irony is that the very disdain for convention which endeared Boris Johnson to voters who were tired of plastic politicians is what threatens to bring him down.

There are two other social groups which have traditionally played the Fool. The first is the long tradition of Irishmen who were jesters to the English court. One thinks of the 18th century writer Oliver Goldsmith, who hailed from the Irish midlands and seemed to exist in London simply for the amusement of Samuel Johnson and his circle. The Dubliner Edmund Burke, one of the finest orators the House of Commons has ever witnessed, was said by some English MPs to smell of whisky and potatoes. His scorching rhetoric, which once caused some gentlewomen in the public gallery of the Commons to faint away, could easily be dismissed as blather and blarney.

Some decades ago, the resident Irish jester to the English nation was the bibulous playwright Brendan Behan, who graduated from the IRA via Borstal to the London TV studios. He once described himself as a drinker with a writing problem. Television producers would wait until late in the evening, when Behan was bound to be drunk, and then haul him on their show to be interviewed. Not long ago, the Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin inherited this dubious honour, loudly berating all and sundry on late night television. He did so, however, in a thick Belfast accent which signalled that he wasn’t really one of us, and so was not to be taken too seriously. You could savour his idiosyncrasies while overlooking his opinions. As Olivia remarks in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool.

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The other traditional group of clowns is old-style Oxbridge dons. Seriousness for them, too, is a vulgar affair fit mainly for traffic wardens. Only nerds talk shop. A medical colleague of mine who spent much of his time plucking bits of helmet from the brains of dying motorcyclists would saunter into college dinner and recount a few amusing anecdotes about golf. I was also acquainted with one of the world’s experts on black holes, who was as silent on the subject of astronomy as if he was a bouncer in a night club. As a young don still wet behind the ears, I once asked a senior colleague how many children he had.

This was an unforgivable move, since it made it almost impossible for him not to give a factual reply, and facts were for oiks. He did, however, sidle out of it superbly. “Oh, thousands and thousands,” he sighed. This is the background from which Boris Johnson emerged. No wonder he can’t tell the truth.

One by one all the vast palaces of the aristocracy were “expropriated” — a favourite word of the revolution — and systematically vandalised and looted. Their lavish interiors were trashed, paintings slashed, priceless Aubusson carpets ruined, antique furniture broken up for firewood and famous wine cellars pillaged in an orgy of drinking and violence. Even Lenin was seen driving around the city in one of Nicholas II’s prized Delaunay-Belleville limousines.

What a contrast this was to the last gilded, heady days of the Belle Epoque, when the old tsarist oligarchs had indulged themselves in the food, fine wines, casinos and high-class courtesans of Paris. Before the war, couples such as the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and his wife Olga had a swanky home in the Bois de Boulogne, where they entertained the glitterati of Marcel Proust’s Paris. At Madame Yturbe’s Hungarian costume ball in 1912, Olga arrived dripping in luxury — in a dress by Worth encrusted with rows of pearls and a Cartier tiara of pear-shaped diamonds.

The legendary wealth of the Russian elite was perhaps epitomised by the fabulous jewellery they purchased in St Petersburg from the leading imperial jeweller and master goldsmith, Carl Fabergé. The high point of Romanov extravagance was manifested in the fabulous, ornately jewelled Easter eggs that Fabergé produced for the Imperial Family between 1886 and 1916 — some 54 eggs in all, of which 44 survive today.

Fifteen of those eggs form the centrepiece of the current exhibition “Fabergé: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Of the 233 charming works of art in the show, 13 are on loan from Russian institutions, causing some to question whether they will now be caught up in the new “cultural Cold War”. Will they be returned to Russia while hostilities continue? Already, the UK government has sanctioned the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, whose foundation loaned the golden “Hen egg” for the exhibition.

Coming as it does during this dramatic conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and an accompanying outburst of virulent Russophobia in the West, the Fabergé exhibition cannot help but provide a mournful and telling parallel of what happens to wealth and privilege when they are dispossessed and routed.

In 1917, along with many other private businesses, Carl Fabergé’s was seized and taken over by a workers’ collective. He found it hard to adjust and a year later fled Russia when the Bolsheviks nationalised his company. With German assistance he got out of Petrograd under diplomatic protection and made his way to Lausanne in Switzerland where he died in 1920, heartbroken that the glittering life he had once known “is no more”.

Meanwhile many of his patrons left during the 1919–20 mass exodus south out of Russia — through today’s war-torn Ukraine — to Odessa and Novorossisk when General Wrangel’s White Army took its last stand against the Red Army. At that time, a million Russians fled into Europe — but that figure is today dwarfed by the number of refugees escaping Ukraine.

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Today’s Russian oligarchs — the new post-Soviet aristocracy — now find the screws being tightened on them, just as they were on the Romanovs. More and more demands are being made for their property to be sanctioned as punishment for Putin’s war against Ukraine. For after many years of rumbling criticism, the war has finally drawn the world’s attention to the obscene wealth that this elite group of expatriates have enjoyed for far too long. Given their links to Putin, the seizure of their property, in the eyes of many, is a necessary — if not righteous — penalty for their leader’s sins.

Recently, Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove suggested that perhaps the mansions of today’s Russian oligarchs should be seized and filled with Ukrainian refugees — as “the ultimate payback for Putin’s cronies”. No sooner said than billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska’s lavish mansion in Belgravia was occupied, albeit briefly, by anarchist protesters.

One cannot help but be reminded of a moving scene in David Lean’s film Dr Zhivago, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, where revolutionaries turn up at the large apartment of the comfortably off Gromyko family of Zhivago’s wife Tonya and announce that their home is forfeit. It is now to become a communal dwelling that the Gromykos will have to share with several workers’ families.

While today’s Russian oligarchs are long practised in every possible tax scam and evasion to hide their wealth from possible confiscation, back in 1917, there was no way that the old aristocracy could evade the cudgel of revolutionary retribution. All they could do was grab a few of their most precious and easily portable possessions, travelling into exile with little more than the clothes they stood in, with their few remaining jewels sewn into their garments.

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For Russian refugees, these family heirlooms would be the currency of exile, the only tradable possessions they had left with which to sustain themselves in their future severely reduced lives. Or so they thought. The trouble was that their jewellery had greatly depreciated in value. This was due to a flood of such goods on the European market at the end of the war. For the Russians were not the only aristocracy to have seen their monarchy crash and be forced into selling off their jewels — the German and Austro-Hungarian thrones had gone the same way too.

Only one aristocrat of note, Grand Duchess Vladimir, saw her jewels safely smuggled out of her grand palace in St Petersburg – to London, by a British art dealer and unofficial spy named Bertie Stopford. But her fabulous collection, that had once been the envy of all Paris, was sold off after her death in 1920 to sustain her children in exile. Her magnificent diamond and emerald tiara by court jeweller Carl Edvard Bolin was bought by Queen Mary in 1922 and is a favourite piece worn by our own Queen Elizabeth.

As the Russian old guard fled their homeland they settled into communities of exiles in Berlin, Paris, London and elsewhere. Reduced to poverty, made worse by a lack of skills or any kind of training that would find them jobs, they discovered that the jewels they thought would last them for many years soon ran out. One émigré, Grand Duke Alexander, noted with despair how the proceeds from the sale of his wife Xenia’s great strings of Romanov pearls had lasted just three years. In London, Russian exiles sold their Fabergé treasures for a song at antiques dealers such as Wartski’s in Old Bond Street.

But at least these communities of exiles had each other and could share in the experience of dispossession and poverty. Where will today’s despised Russian oligarchs end up if they continue to support Putin’s pariah regime? Already, many have fled to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a financial haven where their wealth can ensure some kind of dismal but comfortable purdah. Their other option, of course, is to leave all their foreign assets behind, and return to Russia — retreating behind the new ‘iron curtain’ that is rapidly descending on their homeland.

The first season opened, nine years ago, with the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the loss of the Abbey’s heir. If this was a metaphor for the withering of the British aristocracy, Downton Abbey did not follow through. Neither did reality: the aristocracy are still more important than they should be, although they try to hide it, usually by appearing to be very stupid. Self-interested self-deprecation has replaced a sword. So they cower politely, because it suits them.

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It is decadent to watch television that details a nation’s oblivious self-hatred, but Americans do it often. In the superhero film genre they cannot stop imagining their own mass deaths. It is as if they long for it to happen and cannot stop imagining how exactly they will die, and how they will feel.

In Britain we are more subtle but only slightly; instead of alien raids and broken cities we imagine a class system we should be happy to see wither return in full pomp: a happy nation under a benevolent aristocrat, who may assume a faint anxiety disorder, should he be seen to be enjoying it too much. We wear social democracy much too lightly here, and that is a problem, for there is no functional hagiography for that. Marvel at the viewing figures for Downton Abbey – 13m at their height – and you would barely believe it exists at all.

I wonder, rather, if the programme and its impersonators did not contribute to the miasma of snobbery, nostalgia and brutality that encouraged Brexit, and made parliament a mockery, while the Queen sits inside a 72% approval rating. I think it is dangerous. Dream of a toy feudal state and it might eventually appear to greet you.

The trailer rolled out like a dream sequence from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s brain. There will be a royal visit to Downton Abbey, in case there is not, already, enough nobility inside Charles Barry’s mouldering Highclere Castle, which is Downton Abbey. (Barry also made the Palace of Westminster, but the Abbey is in rather better shape these days.) There is gay bunting, merry villagers, and servants in silly costumes looking grateful for the opportunity to serve.

“Welcome your Majesties,” says Lady Crawley (Elizabeth McGovern), curtseying low enough to meet the servants on the way back up. The butler Mr Carson (Jim Carter) returns from semi-retirement in an idealised tied cottage to save – I am presuming, but I would bet money on it – the royal dinner party. He will hold the class system up, by himself if needs be.

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The creator of Downton Abbey is Julian Kitchener-Fellowes, who once played Lord Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen, which was an affable Scottish precursor to Downton Abbey. He was made a real lord for services to costume drama — again I presume — in 2011, with the motto post proelia praemia: After Battle Comes Reward. Battles, as master propagandists have noted, are not fought where they used to be.

When Kitchener-Fellowes is not writing, he is scheming for his wife Emma to inherit an earldom; so much so, that when Lynn Barber in an interview suggested that Emma become a man to inherit, he appeared to seriously consider it.

His worship of nobility is real. And so his Lord Crawley — Hugh Bonneville taking avuncular to some sort of awful nadir — is a kindly landlord who, among other nonsensical acts of altruism that would shame his fictional ancestors, saves his cook Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) from blindness. He married his (American) wife for money — that much of Downton Abbey is true — but he had the good manners to fall in love with her afterwards. Or was it embarrasment?

His angst aside, the lesson of Downton Abbey is that the class system exists for our benefit, even if aristocrats let Labradors emote for them, and that is a tragedy, but only for them, and without it we would become meaningless and tiny in the world. Its lesson is — we are children, and we should look to others to take care of us.

Kitchener-Fellowes is not alone in polishing the class system; others who should know better do it too, and much too well for comfort.

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The Crown, for instance, now entering series 3 — the boring years of the Queen’s reign, between creamy ingenue and ancient sorceress — is funded by Netflix and written by Peter Morgan. It is clever propaganda — you pity Elizabeth Mountbatten as she becomes Elizabeth Regina — but the best propaganda is clever: state your allegiance too baldly, and you will not carry your befugged audience with you.

The Crown repeats the myth that Elizabeth II is a selfless, unusually kind woman who would rather not wear the burden of the crown. (Shakespeare wrote in this vein too. It is the familiar line of the propagandist, whether William Shakespeare or Julian Kitchener-Fellowes. You can get away with anything if people think you are doing it for their sakes). The object of devotion is sacred, and reluctant; of the impact of monarchy on others — on us, still lurking underneath all this gilded misery — you learn nothing. There is a parallel narrative but you rarely hear it publicly; it is as if we are asleep. Prince Andrew is the principal argument for this parallel narrative, but we are too unconscious to listen.

Morgan actually meets members of the royal household to describe each new piece of hagiography, which is a gruesome fate for such a fine writer. I can only imagine that, like so many biographers before him, he has fallen in love with his subject, and longs for her approval; but the British Establishment, which watched almost every other crown in Europe fall, has always worked like that. It gathers talent to itself – for what damage might it do outside?

“Respectfully,” Morgan says, “I tell them what I have in mind and they brace themselves slightly.” I doubt that. I wonder, rather, if when Morgan leaves, they perform high fives.

Morgan’s art is monarchist; he also said that Tobias Menzies’ performance as Elizabeth’s consort, “will do a lot of good for Prince Philip. Because Prince Philip is not considered a complex person.” There is a reason for that.

Elizabeth II, meanwhile, will be played by Olivia Coleman with her Academy Award for Queen Anne in The Favourite – she moved from Queen to Queen. It was the fifth Academy Award for an English monarch in the guise of an actor. There was Colin Firth for George VI, the founder of the reluctant monarch myth; Helen Mirren for Elizabeth II; Judi Dench for Elizabeth I; and Katharine Hepburn for Queen Eleanor.

This happens so often I wonder if it is hereditary monarchy they are rewarding.

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That creators of art — but not Kitchener-Fellowes, the Conservative peer, of course — usually consider themselves progressive makes it all the more ludicrous that the shared national culture they create is, in spirit, centuries old. I await an homage to the Plantagenets, with emphasis on their cracked inter-personal relationships.

I do not suggest that social democracy is not valued because people watch Downton Abbey. I suspect is more likely that they watch Downton Abbey because they do not value social democracy as they should, and instead, dream backwards to a time when things were simpler – and worse.