Bonfire of the Establishment

In September 1955 The Spectator’s political commentator, Henry Fairlie, coined a term to describe the way in which Britain works which has been used ever since. The ‘Establishment’, he said, was the real mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. The elites of the business, political and media worlds wielded power via a ‘matrix of official and social relations’, which varied from the banks to the director-general of the BBC to ‘divinities’ such as Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury). The social and economic upheavals of the following decades only caused this Establishment to regenerate. But it has never faced an existential threat — until now.

The Establishment is in chaos. Financiers are still being routed, as the recent Barclays upheaval shows. Politicians are being found guilty of breaking laws: Chris Huhne’s predicament is remarkable only because of his fairly recent status as a Cabinet member. The sight of politicians being put behind bars is no longer unusual in Britain: six have been sent to prison in the last three years.

Journalists may not be far behind. There have, so far, been 100 arrests in the hacking scandal, which has turned into the biggest criminal investigation in modern British history. Police are arresting police; a 50-year-old officer was grabbed in a dawn raid this week. Newspapers face state regulation now not because they are powerful, but because they have grown too weak to defend themselves and their right to free speech. The BBC’s recent Newsnight disgrace was due in large part to subcontracting investigations to cowboy operations.

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Matthew Parris

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Regulation is far from the greatest threat to newspapers: they are haemorrhaging readers and power. On current trends, the last paper copy of the Independent will be bought in April 2013, and of the Financial Times in 2018; the Daily Express will vanish in 2019, and the Guardian early in 2020.