Who really rules Britain?

I talked to Sam Friedman about Britain’s elite - and its political power

‘Elite’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot in politics. Almost every story about Donald Trump in Davos last week came with a casual reference to the ‘elites’ gathered at the World Economic Forum.

That’s understandable. Davos, with its private jets, exclusive guest list and Alpine isolation, practically advertises itself as elite territory. Yet Trump – and Nigel Farage, who was also there – like to present themselves as fearless champions of the people, taking on shadowy, self-serving elites.

Which raises an obvious question: who actually counts as ‘the elite’? And what do we really mean when we talk about elites in British politics?

These are questions I’ve been thinking about for some time. A couple of years ago, academic-turned-Reform-supporting-Substacker Matt Goodwin published a book arguing that Britain has been captured by a new ‘woke elite’: university-educated liberals that makes up as much as 25 per cent of the population.

I found the thesis deeply unconvincing. How can a quarter of the country be an elite?

What about those with wealth, power and influence stretching back generations? Or those who are culturally and politically conservative? After all, two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s 2020 cabinet had been privately educated.

I wanted a clearer picture of what Britain’s elite actually looks like - and whether it is really changing. So I invited sociologist Sam Friedman onto Democracy for Sale.

Sam is a professor at the London School of Economics and a leading expert on class in Britain. He’s also the co-author, with Aaron Reeves, of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite.

The book is a forensic study of elite power in Britain, combining original interviews with large-scale quantitative research. (Their analysis of all 125,000 entrants in Who’s Who since 1897 is particularly striking.) It goes far beyond loose cultural claims to show, in detail, who holds power - and how.

What emerges from Born to Rule is a picture far more precise than Goodwin’s sprawling ‘new elite’. Sam estimates that Britain’s elite makes up around 0.05 per cent of the population. Within that sits an even smaller ‘wealth elite’ of roughly 6,000 people: the one per cent of the one per cent.

The book is full of revealing pen portraits. Early on we meet Henry, a corporate lawyer living in a seven-bedroom townhouse in Bloomsbury, with wealth north of £10 million - who nonetheless rejects the idea that he is part of the elite.

This is a recurring theme. Many members of Britain’s elite do not recognise themselves as such. That’s partly down to the familiar human instinct to credit success to hard work rather than privilege. But it also reflects something more strategic.

As Sam puts it, British society operates a “symbolic marketplace for ordinariness”. Being seen as ‘ordinary’ is politically and culturally valuable - even, or especially, if you are anything but.

When Rishi Sunak ran for the Conservative leadership in 2022, he foregrounded his immigrant mother and a rags-to-riches narrative. He spoke less about his father, a doctor, or his education at Winchester College.

This drive for ordinariness means elites often pass unnoticed, cloaked in stories of humble beginnings – even when, in Sunak’s case, that adversity is not having Sky TV growing up.

It also explains why senior politicians, who are by definition members of the elite, go to great lengths to appear ‘normal’. Keir Starmer’s (entirely genuine) references to his toolmaker father were often dismissed as contrived, while Dulwich College-educated Farage is routinely described as the politician voters would most like to have a pint with.

So how does Britain’s elite map onto politics?

Born to Rule is leery of the notion of a vast liberal elite running Britain. While some elite groups have become more socially progressive, those at the very top of the wealth distribution still skew heavily to the right, Sam argues.

This ‘wealth elite’ also bankrolls British politics. Anyone able to pay the £50,000 annual fee to join the Conservatives’ ‘Leader’s Group’ of top donors is, by definition, among the richest of the rich.

And it isn’t just the Tories. As we reported before Christmas, three-quarters of all the money Reform has ever raised comes from just three extremely wealthy white men. Labour, too, has become increasingly reliant on a small number of super-rich donors.

Sam isn’t only interested in mapping elite power; he’s also concerned with how it might be challenged. We talked about the policy levers available to government to address the concentration of wealth and influence at the very top – including curbing the power of elite private schools and their old-boy networks.

The story of the past two decades has been one of growing wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite – whether gathered in Davos or based in Mayfair. My hope is that today’s conversation helps cut through the myths, to show who Britain’s real elites are, and how their political power so often remains hidden.