It’s official, David Starkey says so: the old aristocracy, the one based on land and genealogy, is dead. The entitlement of the new ruling class to be gathered in Westminster Abbey last Friday is based on money alone. A public school education certainly helps, but lots of money will do, however you acquired it. Posh and Becks, Elton and David, they were all there. It is fitting that William’s dukedom is the very constituency that Oliver Cromwell represented: the English bourgeois revolution is at an end. It took three and a half centuries. We can only hope the next one will be quicker. Continue reading →