The parable of Soho House

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A friend of mine first entertained doubts that Soho House was cool when he saw four alumni of his school there. “Accountant, accountant, solicitor, accountant”. Respectable lines of work, I think. The bohemian distaste for conventional wealth is foolish. But there is lots of it, lots of resentment in return and no understanding history without a sense of this eternal friction between people with cachet and people with cash. 

I am in the Bangkok branch of Soho House, escaping the heat. There is no outward sign of the troubles said to be afflicting this overstretched empire of a members’ club. Still, the recent fuss about whether it has let in too much of the wrong sort has revealed something. The most important social tensions are within the elite — not, as a decade of populism has pretended, between the elite and the people.  

The person likeliest to tear down a nation’s establishment is a half-member of it. He or she is close enough to have felt its condescension (which must be largely theoretical for a total outsider) and to know its weak points. Donald Trump, disdained as a bridge-and-tunnel vulgarian for all his material privilege, is the most famous example. But there are others. It wasn’t just England’s deindustrialised north and Midlands that voted for Brexit. So did the non-London south-east, an affluent place in the main, but also one teeming with the sort of white-collar commuters who wouldn’t have made the Soho House cut in the past.  

Whatever the setting, social or geopolitical, watch out for the relative loser in life, not just the absolute one

The modern wave of Anglo-American populism still hasn’t thrown up a leader who is, like Nixon, of the people. Tucker Carlson’s father was US ambassador to the Seychelles. Boris Johnson’s life tour — Eton, Brussels, Islington — sounds nice. Nigel Farage is a…