56 Britain The EconomistFebruary 13th 2021
S
ometimes fictionalcharacters are so vivid that they cannot be
confined to the page. Augustus Melmotte began life as a villain
in Anthony Trollope’s 1875 masterpiece “The Way We Live Now”.
Seventy years later he escaped into the real world in the form of
Captain Robert Maxwell, a Czech war hero whose extraordinary
rise and fall is the subject of a new book (see Books & arts section).
Melmotte is a large man with heavy eyebrows and a “wonderful
look of power about his mouth and chin”. Nobody knows where he
came from, and nobody knows why he’s so rich, though there are
rumours of chicanery in Paris and Vienna. But none of this is a bar-
rier to his social ascent. He sets up a company that promises to
build a railway linking Utah with Mexico and throws lavish parties
at his rented house in Grosvenor Square. The Emperor of China
comes to dinner along with various ministers and “a prince of the
blood royal”. He swiftly becomes a Conservative mpfor the plum
seat of Westminster.
Melmotte and Maxwell are doppelgangers all the way down to
the heavy eyebrows. But the most important similarities between
the two lie not in their physiognomies but in the way they are
treated by British society. The real target of Trollope’s novel is not
the monstrous Melmotte but the even ghastlier “we” of the book’s
title—the Lords and Ladies Monogram with the grandest of pedi-
grees and the basest of motives. Impoverished aristocrats promise
to marry Melmotte’s daughter for “half a million down”. Dissolute
young men who know nothing about either railways or Utah ac-
cept well-paid seats on his board. The Conservative Party takes
him up in return for “fiscal assistance” and, as a newly minted mp,
he enters Parliament on the arm of the prime minister. And they do
all this while privately despising the newcomer who doesn’t un-
derstand the secret codes that hold British society together. (A par-
ticularly excruciating passage describes Melmotte’s confusion
about when to wear a top hat in the chamber.)
The British establishment prides itself on openness to foreign
talent. Look at the City of London: Rothschild’s bank has occupied
the same spot in New Court, St Swithin’s Lane, since 1809. Or look
at the world of learning: while Maxwell was swindling share-
holders imported geniuses were revolutionising almost every
branch of learning from English history (Lewis Namier) to archi-tecture(NikolausPevsner) to the history of ideas (Maxwell’s neigh-
bour in Oxford, Isaiah Berlin). When Berlin died in 1997 William
Waldegrave, a man at the heart of the British establishment who is
now provost of Eton, wrote that “if you had asked me to show you
what I meant by the ideal of Englishness...I would have taken you
to see Isaiah Berlin.”
But the stories of Melmotte and Maxwell reveal a darker side to
British openness. The apparently generous welcome is actually
the offer of a deal: social position, and the stamp of respectability
that goes with it, for cash.
Consider the transatlantic marriage market: in the late Victor-
ian and Edwardian era great British aristocrats responded to the
agricultural depression by marrying their sons to the daughters of
American plutocrats. By 1914, 60 peers and 40 younger sons of
peers had married American heiresses, most notably the ninth
Duke of Marlborough who married Consuela Vanderbilt. Or con-
sider political funding. Lloyd George’s great honours fire-sale of
1916-1922, when he sold 91 hereditary peerages and 1,500 knight-
hoods, ground to a halt only when he tried to ennoble Joseph Rob-
inson, a South African gold and diamond magnate whose reputa-
tion was so unsavoury that George V objected. Harold Wilson’s
resignation honours list in 1976 included the names of several
businessmen who may have taken buccaneering to unusual
lengths. Joseph Kagan, for example, a Lithuanian-born textile
maker who funded Wilson’s private office for years and provided
the prime minister with his trade-mark Gannex raincoats, was
awarded a peerage, only to end up in prison for tax fraud.
Thanks to globalisation, the trade in cash for respectability has
boomed since the demise of Maxwell, who disappeared off his
yacht in 1991. Oliver Bullough, the author of “Moneyland”, points
out that Britain, particularly London, is home to the world’s largest
collection of insecure plutocrats: not just attention-seeking Rus-
sians who buy flashy toys like football clubs, but also the more
self-effacing Chinese. They have spawned a vast industry of people
who do their best to make sure that, in Boris Johnson’s phrase, Brit-
ain is to the billionaire what the jungle of Sumatra is to the orang-
utan: City panjandrums who list foreign companies on the London
Stock Exchange; lawyers who protect their reputation with fear-
some libel suits; public-relations consultants who burnish their
image; family offices that not only look after their cash but also
help open the right doors; public schools that furnish their chil-
dren’s brains, polish their manners and get them admitted to the
best universities. Residency in Britain is for sale: a Tier One Invest-
ment visa is available for a minimum investment of £2m in the
country—a very reasonable price given the many social and eco-
nomic advantages that it confers.
Britain’s political establishment remains as venal as it was
when Trollope skewered it a century and a half ago. Sometimes the
greed is Lloyd-Georgian in its crudity: last year Lubov Chernukhin,
the wife of a former Russian finance minister, paid tens of thou-
sands to play tennis with Boris Johnson. Usually it relies on a nod
and a wink. Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a former kgbagent and a fa-
miliar figure in Tory circles, until recently employed George Os-
borne, a former chancellor, as editor of the Evening Standard, and
has entertained Mr Johnson at his “party-castle” in Italy. He was re-
cently elevated to the peerage as Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Si-
beria. The Melmottes and Maxwells of this world may come and
go. But the British upper classes go on forever, shape-shifting but
sempiternal, sponging but self-satisfied, lethargic but opportu-
nistic, the world’s most cynical and accomplished free-loaders. 7Bagehot The price of acceptance
The British establishment is one of the most open in the world—for a consideration