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dead by then.’³

      Anna Woodthorpe Brown, mother of two, and daughter of Irish working-class parents, who was educated at a Roman Catholic comprehensive and brought up on a council estate and who defined herself as ‘middle class’, was interviewed in the Observer for a feature on class in 1993, a few years after John Major promised a classless society. ‘My big thing is people not being able to control their reproductive parts. I just get irritated people aren’t in control of the number of people living around them that are dependent on them. They moan about it, and they whinge about the fact they don’t have enough facilities to take care of those people they’ve reproduced.’

      This hostility towards people at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale having lots of children has only intensified as the era of austerity has taken hold, and the Coalition government has vowed to cut back on benefit payments. A small number of people who have undoubtedly abused the system, by using children to get higher up on the council homes waiting list, has tarnished the reputation of all who chose for whatever reason to have a large family. The prejudice is deeply held by many. John Ward, a councillor, said during the Shannon Matthews farrago, when a woman from West Yorkshire kidnapped her own child in an attempt to win reward money: ‘There is a strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second child, or third, or whatever while living off state benefits.’⁴ Louise Casey, the head of the Government’s troubled families unit, said in the summer of 2012 that struggling mothers with lots of children, who are a drain on social workers’ resources, should be ‘ashamed’ of the damage they inflict on society.

      My mother was born too late to be presented at court to the Queen, a practice which ended in 1958, but she was unequivocally a ‘deb’, with a coming-out ball and the strict expectation she would marry someone she met in this tight group of people. The archaic tradition of debs and ‘the Season’ served a most definite purpose for the aristocrats and Portland Privateers of their day, many of whom didn’t go to university or work in a bustling office – it provided a forum in which to meet a spouse. It was also a way for their parents to assert their status. The Season limped on for many years and still exists in a truncated and rather commercial form to this day. I was surprised one summer holiday, in the mid-1990s while I was at university, to suddenly receive a number of invitations to parties from people I’d never heard of. When I mentioned this to my mother she explained I must have made it onto Peter Townend’s list of ‘debs’ delights’. Townend was the idiosyncratic, amusing if oleaginous, borderline alcoholic, ‘confirmed bachelor’ editor of the Bystander column in Tatler magazine, who single-handedly managed to keep the Season alive after the Queen stopped presentations. It was he, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the gentry and squirearchy of Britain (he was a one-time editor of Burke’s Peerage, which he kept by his hospital bed as he lay dying) and an insatiable appetite for cocktail parties, who drew up the list of debs. He was a one-man arbiter of who was upper class. Each spring he would send 200 letters to mothers in his extravagant turquoise handwriting inviting them (you could never apply) to submit their daughters. My sister was persuaded by my mother to partake, and found the whole experience a painful one.

      I too thought Townend’s puppet-master act bizarre and ever so slightly creepy. Despite the allure of free champagne and vol-au-vents, I was happy to turn down the invitations to stand awkwardly in a room with people I’d never met – even if that was how my parents had found each other, both of whom loved the whole process. It just wasn’t for me. I knew instinctively that anyone whose mother thought I was a debs’ delight was not going to make future wife material. I ended up marrying outside my class. This sounds an absurd statement to write, but back in the 1950s, or even the 1960s when my mother and father met, this was still a radical idea. When Princess Margaret broke off her relationship with divorcé Peter Townsend (not to be confused with Tatler man Townend) in 1955, it was widely seen as a class issue rather than a religious one, with many unhappy that she wanted to marry an untitled commoner. It prompted a thunderous letter to the Daily Express written by a number of angry young men, including the cartoonist Ronald Searle, the public school film-maker Lindsay Anderson and Kenneth Tynan, who said: ‘It has revived the old issue of class distinctions in public life.’⁵

      Fifty-five years later nearly all applauded William’s marriage to Kate Middleton. Only pockets of 1950s-style resistance remained. A letter to the Telegraph from a James Lewis, in Wembley, said: ‘SIR – I don’t doubt that middle-class Miss Middleton is just what “The Firm” needs. However, that is not what royalty is all about. The Royal family is by definition above us all. You cannot have an institution that is bowed to, sung to in anthems, privileged and exalted in history, and then say it needs penetrating by the middle class.’ No one outside of hard-core Telegraph letter writers seriously questioned the appropriateness of the marriage. Most immediately recognised that they came from two very different classes, but the idea that this meant they could not form a successful union was not seriously entertained.

      If you accept that people come from different classes, you have to also accept that the act of marriage allows one member of the partnership, or both, to alter their class. It sounds feudal, but it is a simple act that still transforms many families’ sense of position. The choice of whom you marry remains one of the surest ways for people to leave the class into which they are born, and possibly more importantly it ensures that their children have a different sense of their status than they do – a process that continues with endless little acts of consumption from the moment they leave the womb.

      Carole Middleton, born in 1955, arguably represents the golden generation of social mobility. Statistics show that of those people born into the poorest families in 1958, fewer than one in three was still poor three decades later. Most had moved up the ­ ladder – impressively, almost one in five had reached the highest income bracket.⁶ Much of their journey upwards was thanks to Britons enjoying significant amounts of disposable income during this period, allowing them to make purchases and choices that were just not available to the previous generation. The affluent, consumer society not only offered Britons a wide array of choices, from the supermarket they frequented to the clothes they wore and the holidays they took, but also engendered an attitude that you did not have to ape your parents. You could choose to break out of their social circle. You could even marry outside it.

      And of all the consumer purchases available to these New Elizabethans, none was bigger than buying your own home.

CHAPTER 3

       PROPERTY

      Our home is the most expensive consumer product most of us will ever buy. But is home ownership an essential requirement for ‘middle-class’ status? Here we meet the old-fashioned aristocrats, and the Sun Skittlers.

      When the 12th Duke of Bedford, Hastings ‘Spinach’ Russell, died in a mysterious shooting accident in 1953 on his estate in Devon, it appeared to be the final straw for one of Britain’s premier aristocratic families. His son had to find £4.5 million to pay the Treasury in death duties. A sale of 200 Dutch and Flemish paintings, most of them masterpieces, had failed to raise enough money. The trustees of the estate – whose jewel was Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, but which sprawled across several counties – urged the 13th Duke to sell up, give the Abbey to the National Trust and live off the proceeds of the rents from Covent Garden, the prime piece of real estate in central London that the family owned.

      But the 13th Duke, John Russell, who at the time was a fruit farmer in South Africa, was determined that Woburn, given to his ancestors by Henry VIII on the dissolution of the monasteries, would stay in the family and not be sold. ‘Once that happens, then your roots have gone, and if a place like Woburn means anything in terms of history and tradition, then it is only because of the personal identification with the family that has built it up,’ he said.

      The Abbey, with its 120 rooms, then cost some £300,000 a year to maintain, with a heating bill alone of £5,000. It had not been lived in for decades, the paintwork was peeling off the walls, and furniture was stacked up as if in an antiques warehouse. The annual running costs were the equivalent of well over £6 million in today’s money. It seemed impossible that

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