Peter York / Tony Buckingham
(Picture: Tony Buckingham)Is it the end of the Sloane ranger? That’s what Tatler seems to think. The magazine’s latest Little Black Book of society’s ‘most eligible’ men and women, once once full of aristocrats, is different this year. The top spots this time are filled by Chelsea footballer Mason Mount and Love Island’s Gemma Owen, daughter of former England striker Michael.
But Peter York, who wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in the Eighties, says society is as unequal as ever. “It’s a sweet sentiment that Tatler seems to be expressing, but it doesn’t line up with the facts,” he told us today. “We’re not an equal society”. York points out that while 7% of children go to private school, around 50% of students at Oxbridge are privately educated. “Every analyst here and overseas says that inequality has increased and may be increasing yet more in this country” he said. “So it isn’t really like that. People point to footballers because they are the special exception, and every poor boy wants to be a footballer.”
The writer said a similar trend could have been spotted in the Sixties. “The only difference would have been writing about popstars and actors, Michael Caine and Mick Jagger, and saying ‘Who wants an Earl’s son when these people have much more freedom and are much more fun... and they have more money’” he said. But since the Eighties, while the “composition of the seriously rich” has changed, we’ve actually become “more American and more devoted to the seriously rich”, thinks York.
York said one real “revolution” from the Eighties was the idea that women in particular should be well-educated. “If you’ve got tolerable human material and a lot of money, you can in a sense create a meritocrat” he said. “It used to be that the mothers of the girls we talked about in that book weren’t that keen in their daughters getting hyper-educated, they thought about the man she should marry. Then, not so long after that, the typical dads of the next generation of those girls started boasting to me: ‘Ooh my daughter’s got a Double First at Cambridge and she’s now going to do her doctorate at Harvard’”. “It’s not like Diana [the proto-Sloane], who said proudly and rather humourously: ‘I’ve got a Guinea pig rearing certificate’ and that she was ‘as thick as two short planks’”.
Another thing that’s changed is posh people don’t want to be seen as “Tim Nice-but-Dim” any more, so hide their background. “They’re furiously avoiding the dress and speech codes” said York. “But they remanifest it when they go to see granny.” Sloanes... they’re still out there.
