How to Break into the Elite, review: A relentless indictment of class prejudice in modern Britain

The former editor of The Independent, Amol Rajan, is ideally qualified to ask some very uncomfortable questions about who is still getting the top jobs in Britain

I ought first to declare an interest. Amol Rajan was editor of The Independent a few years ago, the youngest in its history. He was very good at it too, as I saw first hand. He went on to become media editor at the BBC, where he enjoys a varied diet of journalism. He has, thus, broken into the elite, or at least the liberal sections of it.

He is also ideally qualified to ask some very uncomfortable questions about who is still getting the top jobs in Britain, and why. It is very much a personal and personalised quest, and he makes slightly heavy weather of his own story in How to Break into the Elite (BBC2). Certainly, the transition from son of Indian immigrants via decent state school to Downing College, Cambridge and what he acknowledges have been excellent mentors in his career is a good story well told. However, driving in his estate car from his current home of Islington (north London) while wearing a bourgeois cardigan to see mum and dad in Tooting (south London), he makes it sound as if he has risen from the rubble of Mogadishu, rather than what looks to be a fairly nice house, in a pleasant enough suburb.

Anyway, it proves the point that he has always believed that hard work and educational opportunity would help dissolve the class divide. But the weight of evidence he gathers during his odyssey disillusions him, and you can almost feel the hurt.

The evidence is sifted and presented carefully, objectively and thoroughly. So we learn that a working-class kid who winds up at Oxbridge, or at a Russell group university, will still usually end up earning less and be less well-promoted and senior than the equivalent child from a middle-class background going into the same type of job. Educational opportunity may be a necessary condition for social mobility, but it is not a sufficient one.

The case studies bear out the academics’ testimonies and the stats. The most poignant is a lad from Birmingham named Amaan. He got a first from Nottingham University in Economics, but simply could not get the job he wanted in the City. So now he has had to incur more debt to gain a masters from Imperial College, just so his educational attainment can put him on an equal footing with someone less smart with a lesser degree, but who has “polish” – code for the “right background”.

How you break into the elite, therefore, depends on your ability to acquire “soft skills”, or to mimic those whose parents are already in the elite. And that is extremely tricky. Working-class kids just don’t know the subtleties. What do you wear for an interview at, say, Channel 4 (casual) or at JP Morgan (bespoke) or at Royal Dutch Shell (off-the-peg)? Then when you get the job, when it is it OK to swear? To dress- down? To put your feet up on the table?

We meet Ben, for example, a case in point, who went to Dulwich College (fee-paying) and his parents worked at the BBC and as a lawyer. He knows the drill already. He has picked up middle-class manners and mores, the confidence that usually comes with a private education, a “posh“ accent and a certain amount of charm. When middle-class folk have dinner and sit around the table, they ask their precocious broadsheet-reading brat what they think about Brexit or the Middle East; this may not happen in every home. It all helps to build extroversion and confidence that one day will have them smashing it in a job interview at Goldman Sachs or chairing meetings in a British embassy with the right mix of assertiveness and collaboration. That type of nurture doesn’t happen in every home.

Ben has no trouble at all talking his way into work experience and interviews. By contrast, the clever but nervous Amaan just falls apart in his job interviews. A recruitment consultant confirms that a female candidate of hers, otherwise superbly well qualified for a top-end City position wouldn’t even be considered because her accent was “too Essexy” and the banks wouldn’t take her on to speak to their well-heeled clients.

One of Rajan’s own mentors, Matthew Wright, suggests that he himself has been pushed out of jobs in the name of “diversity”, but gave way, in his account, to a person of colour who went to a private school (he did not).

Rajan’s interrogation of the subject was rightly relentless, and those of us who’ve managed to emerge from the working classes will recognise immediately the phenomena he analyses – where “polish” and “smooth” and “fitting in” are euphemisms for class discrimination.

Melding together the talking heads, some jolly graphics (about depressing stats on social immobility) and the young job seekers, the case is made that class is now (and may have always have been) the greatest of the barriers to social mobility. Rajan concludes that class is indeed “the last barrier” and especially pernicious. It is harder to see and define than gender or race discrimination; working-class kids don’t have a lobby like other minorities do; and the most deeply rooted superstition in Britain today is that if you sound posh you must be clever. Rajan seems to have made it his personal ambition to defeat such superstitions. He forgot one though – age. He’s too young to have to worry about that. Yet.