In her speech to the Tory conference last week the home secretary, Priti Patel, pledged to “end the free movement of people once and for all”. The applause was lacklustre but she could barely contain her glee as she added, as a daughter of immigrants, she would take no lectures from the “north London metropolitan liberal elite”.
That brought resounding cheers. Ending a freedom is rarely an inspirational cause, but identifying a scapegoat can often stir the spirits. Of course, it’s discordant to hear senior politicians disparage elites, in much the same way that it would be confusing if Kim Kardashian condemned the cult of celebrity.
But leaving that minor issue aside, who are these people Patel doesn’t need lectures from? Presumably she wasn’t referring to her boss, Boris Johnson, who, before the break-up of his marriage, lived in Islington in north London for many years, boasted of his metropolitanism and liberalism while mayor of London, and as a graduate of Eton and Oxford knows a thing or two about economic and educational elitism.
So if not people like the prime minister, then whom? Three years ago Theresa May gave more clues to that answer, when she promised to attack the metropolitan liberal elite in her keynote speech to the Tory conference. Or at least, that’s what the Daily Mail said she would do, helpfully defining May’s target as “the well-heeled group of London ‘intellectuals’ which is used to having everything its own way”.
But May said nothing about metropolitan liberals; she warned of people in positions of power who had more in common with international elites than with the average person, and concluded that if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, “you’re a citizen of nowhere”.
In many respects, Patel was merely delivering on what May had alluded to. The division they both sought to mark out was between those who wanted to end the free movement of people – mainly those who voted to leave the EU – and a well-educated urban class that they claim is oblivious to the social currents created by this freedom.
David Goodhart is author of the book The Road to Somewhere, which argued that Britain is split into three groupings: Somewhere, the half of the population that feels rooted to a particular community and the security it affords; Inbetweeners; and Anywhere – 20-25% of people who are mobile, socially liberal, well educated and, according to Goodhart, overrule majority attitudes.
He believes the Anywhere group, which loosely approximates to a metropolitan liberal elite, is fixated on economic benefits to the exclusion of social and cultural unease.
“That is why the north London liberal elite don’t get it on notions of meaning, respect, status,” he says. “They don’t get the psychology of Brexit. They don’t get the psychology of rapid social change and why it makes people uncomfortable. Or they immediately default to [attributing it to] xenophobia and nativism.”
As the founding editor of Prospect magazine, and an Islingtonite who was a Marxist at Eton, Goodhart was undoubtedly a member of the north London metropolitan liberal elite. But in recent years, increasingly at odds with his friends and peers, he has relinquished his membership of what he calls the “liberal tribe”.
Like an anthropologist with an Oyster card, I begin my search for this tribe outside Waterstones in Hampstead. Home to Sigmund Freud, Michael Foot and Stephen Fry, Hampstead has long been a byword for intellectual, free-thinking liberalism. But how unconstrained is that free-thinking?
I ask a rather severe-looking woman what she thinks of Patel’s speech and she snaps: “Oh no, I can’t stand that woman,” and disappears into the bookshop.
Near the Coffee Cup, a cafe with a history of serving philosophers and politicians, I meet a violinist who’s not prepared to give her name. “We’re very opinionated,” she says of her fellow denizens. “Hampstead is full of highly educated people who don’t hold back.” Are their opinions disproportionately influential? “I wish,” she says, sighing. “If they were, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
A few doors from where the poet Edith Sitwell lived, I encounter a lawyer named Michael Patchett-Joyce, who says he fulfils every category of Patel’s definition. He doesn’t have a problem with it, except when it’s used in a negative sense, in the way the chattering classes and champagne socialism are employed. “Champagne socialism is a pejorative term because there is an inherent oxymoron within that phrase,” says Patchett-Joyce. “In terms of a liberal elite, I don’t think there necessarily is the same sort of oxymoron. It’s not that far removed from one-nation Toryism, which of course is under big debate at the moment.”
That kind of eloquence is not typical of vox-pop contributions, which tend more towards the “I’d get rid of the whole lot of ’em” school of opinion. And it raises the question of whether it’s a bad thing to have a liberal elite. “It’s a bad thing if it’s too powerful and not aware of its own power,” says Goodhart. “There have to be elites. The metropolitan liberal one is a subset of a bigger elite, and one reason we’re experiencing Brexit and Trump is that this elite has been too emotionally unintelligent about how its priorities are not shared by many perfectly decent citizens.”
Yet metropolitan liberals are not immune to the discomfort of change that Goodhart ascribes to the Somewhere half of the population. Primrose Hill Books has long been a browsing place for the intellectuals who moved to this pretty Georgian neighbourhood in the 1960s and 70s – people like Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin and Ralph Miliband (father of Ed and David). Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father, used to have an account at the shop.
“My parents were university lecturers,” says customer Aileen Harvey. “But it seems like now everyone is a French or American City worker or a celebrity.” Harvey doesn’t like the way the neighbourhood has gone. She thinks Patel’s label was designed to appeal to the “less well-off and less well-educated by saying ‘Let’s activate that chip on their shoulder’.” The home secretary was referring to “educated Labour voters”, she says. “They don’t live here any more.”
Jessica Graham, who runs the bookshop with her husband, looks back fondly on the period when Primrose Hill was a centre of intellectual ideas. “When I first came here 30 years ago, it was full of academics, journalists and professional people. Everybody cared, read and everybody discussed things. Those kind of people have been priced out of the neighbourhood.”
She thinks the idea of a liberal elite is an anachronism, partly because in the age of social media and the internet, ideas are less geographically tethered and more widely disseminated. But also due to the effects of high finance.
“It’s more like a global elite,” she says. “Half the houses round here are empty half the time. They’re second homes for anyone from a Russian oligarch to a movie star.”
If these international elites don’t fall within Patel’s crosshairs, it may be because their money is welcome and, on the whole, they’re not critical of the government. A characteristic of metropolitan liberals is that they’re outspoken about how things could or should be. Goodhart sees this as a form of narcissism. “They’re saying: be like us,” he says. “We’ve done it. We’ve gone off to good universities and become middle-class professionals, why can’t you do it? Well, actually because lots of people don’t want to do that and can’t do that.”
He may have a point, but the demonisation of the educated classes is a populist trait that is a well-trodden step on the road to demagoguery. It’s easy to mock metropolitan liberals for hypocrisy. After all, they’re often opposed to gentrification, while being the vanguard of gentrifiers. They’re the loudest proponents of multiculturalism while frequently maintaining a distinctly unicultural lifestyle. But even in this age of bovine anti-elitism, it would be the height of stupidity if people who like to visit bookshops come to be seen as the problem.