Want to understand the English class system? Don't ask this German

Detlev Piltz is a German lawyer who is bewitched by the English class system. “A class of its own” is his subtitle. He is a fan of England (“a wonderland”) and Englishness (“a unicorn”). He is diligent. There is no piece of culture related to the class system he has not read – quotations from George Orwell and Oscar Wilde and Ferdinand Mount fill his pages.

Yet one cannot be fair about a unicorn, or wonderland, with which one is bewitched. He is less concerned with the sweep of history – with what made class and why – than with the details: the mannerisms and habits of the aristocracy which, due to the personal anxieties of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, are a glittering canon of hagiography and denial.

And so this book often reads like an article by one of the class specialists employed by tabloids to troll readers with their lives. Don’t say “toilet”. Don’t call your daughter “Kayleigh”. Parts resemble a guidebook for what I would imagine is the very small number of German lawyers who might wish to impersonate an English aristocrat badly.

In his best moments, Piltz lets the English speak for themselves, which somewhat defeats the point of his book. “We are forever being told we have a rigid class structure,” he quotes Prince Edward saying in the Daily Mail in 1996, presumably after the prince had escaped from his handler. “That’s a load of codswallop.”

He quotes an interviewer asking Lady Longford: “Would it be right to say you come from a comfortable middle-class family?” She replies, startled, “Upper middle class. That’s what we were told,” adding mournfully, “I never knew what it meant”. (As if a child had died.) The late Duchess of Devonshire said, “I think class is the biggest pest that has ever been invented”.

The late Duke of Westminster said, “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up. I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me”. (No, it is in a trust. You can guess why.) These lines tell Piltz’s truth for him, but he can’t take a hint. If the class system is so benevolent, why would those it benefits claim it isn’t helpful, or isn’t there?

It is easy to wear these class goggles if you have never met an English working-class person, and I’m not sure he has. (At least, not socially. He has probably met one in a shop.) He is happy to use the slur “chav” and some of his conclusions are just wrong. “For centuries,” he says, “the English were happily ruled by the upper classes”. Were they? “Being judged as too posh rules out many who aspire to be television reporters, journalists on provincial newspapers, actors or pop stars,” he says. Does it? People are always polite to publicans, he insists. Are they? At these points he sounds more like a recently landed alien than a class butler willing to buff your class identity into something more contemptible that it already is.

Anything that might jolt the class system out of being, or at least create something slighter fairer than what we have – progressive taxation; the abolition of private schools, the benefit of which is diligently noted (why spend the money for nothing?) – is waved away. Progression taxation will lead to us all living in caves. (This is a rare moment of melodrama, but most of the time he is trying to sound what he thinks is English, which means understated.) “To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system adds the insult of shame”. The Empire was, despite everything, “an astonishing feat”.

What he thinks of the new BBC Class Quota – its vow to take 25 per cent of its employees from the working classes by 2027 – I can’t say, but I suspect he will find it ridiculous. Because middle-class Leftists – or anyone vocal enough to publicly argue for progressive politics – are, according to Piltz, also members of the elite, though shrouded in hypocrisy. Who wouldn’t prefer an honest duke? Progressives are “an oligarchy of professional egalitarians. Their aim is not the public interest or to make the world a better place but to exploit mass taste, mass gullibility or mass spending power for their own advantage”. For one who fillets the class so ably – he is aware that it is porous and kaleidoscopic, and it lives in every English crevice, and we take it as eternal, like air – it is only now he finds a monolith.

And so, despite some fascinating information, which he mostly misunderstands, this book is another homage to the England we think exists, rather than the England that does. It deals with our palatable face; our shadows on sundials; our myth. His great reveal – that he boarded for a summer in his youth with a parson and his family in the Cotswolds, and the daughter was the future Theresa May – is buried at the end, thrown away, and I think I know why. It was the source of the bewitchment.

England: A Class of Its Own: An Outsider's View by Detlev Piltz is published by Bloomsbury at ￡20. To order your copy for ￡14.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books