POP GOES CULTURE

By Mark Simpson

'THE NEW ELITES: MAKING A CAREER IN THE MASSES', George Walden, Allen Lane £18.99

A couple of years ago I put together a proposal for a rather special 'Millennium project' with the rabble-raising title, 'Down With!'. It fearlessly took on what it saw as the real Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Fame, Sex, Money and Democracy. 'Down With!' represented an all-out assault on mass culture - since fame, sex, money and democracy are its sacred credo (democracy being the keystone since it is the justification for the other three). A credo which, unlike everything else in our culture these days, cannot be questioned.

My own special perversity/hypocrisy was to pitch this critique of mass culture to TV companies. You won't be surprised to hear that it was not commissioned. Which is just as well, since 'Big Brother' turned out to be a much more damning, apocalyptic - and watchable - indictment of the worship of sex, fame, money and democracy.

Mr Walden is wiser than me and so has chosen to attack the hegemony of mass culture through that elitist and laughably miniscule medium known as books. However, so complete is the hegemony of mass culture these days, and so widespread is the desire to genuflect before it by those who should and in fact do know better (despite their best efforts to disguise the fact), that this is no guarantee that his message will be any better received.

It may be a convenient truism, but if there is any substance to Walden's argument then he is bound to be clapped in the media's most humiliating stocks. His thesis is that, unlike the old elites which, along with their responsibilities, were easily identifiable, the new elites camouflage themselves in condescension and confuse the people they lord it over by 'wearing their clothes, affecting their accents, humming their tunes and sympathising with their daily concerns, in the way that parents strive to enter into the spirit of their children's games'

However, Walden’s crime is not in correctly identifying the source of sovereignty in a mass culture, or pop democracy - everyone with the slightest ambition has already done this long ago - but in actually stating it. In public. What’s more, he does it in unforgivably elegant terms: ‘Nowadays you no longer become rich and powerful by pandering to the princes, but you become very rich and exceedingly powerful by affecting to make princes of the people.’

Clearly New Labour is in the sights of this former Tory MP for Buckingham, ousted in the 1997 landslide of ‘The People’s Party’. However, Walden has left politics and the Tory party, and his critique really does go beyond party parochialism - which he describes as like a battle between rival supermarket chains, engaged in a knock down sale on indistinguishable products. Mr Blair’s ‘glabrous’ smile and Chris Smith’s corporate culture speak come in for a pasting, but so does the populism of the Right (which Mr Hague has recently shown a great talent for).

It is abundantly clear that the Enlightenment notion of democracy as a means by which mankind would be improved has been long since abandoned by both Right and Left. Instead it has just become another way to sell mediocrity. Alexis De Tocqueville’s ‘unpopular’ prediction that ‘Democracy will create a mild form of dictatorship that will degrade men without tormenting them’ has been awfully borne out. Scandalously, the very idea of ‘improvement’ of anything apart from your hairdo or your home has been labelled ‘patronising’ by the condescending media elites, who, as Walden points out, have themselves been ‘improved’ by expensive, usually private educations. The number of Oxbridge graduates entering the press and TV has tripled in the last thirty years - an intake which includes the Chief Executive of Channel Five-in-a-Bed (Haberdashers and Cambridge), and Peter Bazalgette, the eminence sleaze behind ‘Big Brother’ (Dulwich College and Cambridge).

The invective Walden deploys against these truly condescending people and the real nature of their relationship to their ‘social equals’ in ‘classless’ Britain is delightfully withering: ‘A glance around a typical council estate and modest street tells its tale,’ he writes. ‘The houses of the helots hold forth their TV dishes like begging-bowls to be filled by their social and educational betters, the new elites.’

Sometimes Walden’s style verges on pedantic schoolmasterly, as when he informs us that ‘ultra’ means ‘beyond’ not ‘extreme’ (because the pigment ‘ultra-marine’ means the pigment used comes from ‘beyond the seas’ not because it is ‘extremely blue’). But then, this country needs more pedantic schoolmasters and less of the ‘Hey guys’ phoney matey ‘superhead’ style of, say, the Prime Minister.