The English may be suspicious of foreigners but we sometimes need them to explain us to ourselves. Detlev Piltz, a German lawyer, became an anglophile as a 16-year-old schoolboy when he spent a month in the home of a Cotswold vicar, whose infant daughter Theresa would grow up to become prime minister. The English, he thinks, are a “wondrously wacky people”. And what especially fascinates him is our class system, the nuances of which he has been studying for half a century.
He thinks it’s the elephant in our room, something we don’t talk about, or which we pretend doesn’t exist. For a politician to admit to having a privileged background is “political suicide”; even Labour, once the party of the proletariat, finds class an uncomfortable subject. MPs may talk of levelled up, one-nation togetherness but they know it’s unattainable. “Class is the enemy of equality,” Piltz says, but that’s no reason to knock it. To his mind, England isn’t class-ridden but class-enriched.
For 200 pages he lays out his case, broadly distinguishing between the “hard” markers of class (education, occupation and income) and the “soft” (everything from clothes and furnishings to cars, holidays, sport and shopping bags). But it’s in the middle section of the book that the fun begins, as he updates Nancy Mitford, Jilly Cooper and The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with exhaustive lists of the things that denote our place in the pecking order.
Piltz’s lists are provocative. Intentionally so, perhaps: if he isn’t invited on to chatshows to defend his findings, I’ll throw away my brown shoes, which I shouldn’t be wearing anyway (“In London shoes are only black … Brown shoes are best kept for tramping the hills”). Many of his markers look well past their sell-by: does anyone still say “spiffing” and “dash it”? And does Piltz seriously believe that the “majority of English citizens” look up to hereditary peers? His book has little sense of how race, gender and social media have changed the rules.
He does try to be even-handed but his prejudices invariably show through. On upper/lower differences when it comes to clothes, for example, it’s “look stylish” versus “look like a fashion victim”; with conversation, “dialogue/monologue”; and with vacations, an “activity holiday” as opposed to “binge-drinking and getting sunburned”. Discretion is always preferred. “Sartorial perfection and overgrooming are the trappings of a spiv,” we’re told, which also holds true for gardens: it doesn’t do to be neat and tidy.
Once the fun with lists is over, Piltz returns to his defence of the status quo. Hierarchies are inevitable. Meritocracy doesn’t work: when everyone has the same chance, the losers have only themselves to blame – or as the exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky puts it: “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him.” Fat-cat salaries shouldn’t be resented since CEOs are “vital for society as a whole”.
At 400-plus pages, Piltz is nothing if not thorough. He includes some great quotes and such gems as the 2015 Country Life list of the 39 attributes that make a gentleman (they include “turns his mobile to silent at dinner” and “can sail a boat and ride a horse”). How sweet that a German lawyer should find us so charming! It’s just a pity he’s so in thrall to our upper echelons. And that he welcomes Brexit as an expression of English patriotism and courage. To which the average reader of the Guardian (a newspaper he’s not too keen on) may be tempted to say: “Bullshit!” – or, as a proper gentleman would put it: “Pish tosh!”
• England: A Class of Its Own – An Outsider’s View by Detlev Piltz is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
