Rees-Mogg interprets the Jason Arday affair as suggesting that Cambridge’s desire to demonstrate progress on diversity may have made his candidacy unusually attractive and, in doing so, weakened the ordinary scepticism and scrutiny that should accompany a senior academic appointment. Cambridge has announced an independent inquiry into Arday’s 2022 appointment following allegations concerning plagiarism and aspects of his record. Rees-Mogg’s wider argument is directed principally towards Cambridge itself: towards the judgement exercised in making the appointment and the assumptions that may have influenced it.
The controversy raises an older and much broader question: by what principles should a society decide who is entitled to advance?
The nineteenth century provides a particularly revealing vantage point because it was both the high age of British imperial, industrial and commercial power and a period of extraordinary social movement. Old hierarchies still appeared formidable, yet beneath them fortunes were being made and lost, new professions were expanding, cities were growing, education was spreading and political power was gradually widening. Much of the social landscape inherited by the twentieth century — its ideas about class, merit, opportunity, respectability and advancement — was formed on this shifting ground.
At the beginning of the century, rank and privilege could still appear to carry their own justification. Wealth underpinned much of what appeared as birth, property, family and connection. Money bought education, social access, advantageous marriage and influence; those advantages in turn helped families preserve or enlarge their fortunes. Privilege could therefore become cumulative, but it was never necessarily permanent. When the money went, much of the access and influence went with it.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were consequently something of a social kaleidoscope: families, fortunes and classes continually changed position and status. The Birlings in An Inspector Calls, for example, are prosperous but socially ambitious; Sheila’s marriage to Gerald Croft promises an alliance with a wealthier and more established family. Such marriages were one of the ways in which money, status and connection could be converted into one another.
At any given moment, however, the resulting social pattern could appear permanent and absolute to those living within it. Yet it was an ever-shifting phantasmagoria, presenting the illusion of solidity while drifting towards very uncertain futures.
At the same time, the human cost of the social order became increasingly difficult to ignore. Poverty, child labour, insecurity and the waste of individual ability confronted reformers with an obvious moral question: why should the circumstances of birth determine so much of a person’s fate? Growing awareness of the suffering of the working classes weakened the assumption that inherited position was sufficient justification for inequality.
Older habits of deference did not simply disappear. They survived in institutions, manners and expectations, and the society that grew out of them eventually became our own. We are still wrestling with the same underlying conflict: how far should inherited advantage, social circumstance and group identity influence the opportunities available to an individual, and how far should advancement depend on demonstrated ability?
Nineteenth-century Britain became one of the great testing grounds for that question. Industrialisation, the rise of the middle classes and the growing complexity of the state and economy made inherited connection an increasingly inadequate means of deciding who should occupy positions of responsibility. Patronage was attacked not merely as unfair but as inefficient. Competitive examinations, professional qualifications and more impersonal methods of appointment increasingly sought to substitute demonstrated competence for connection.
The question gradually shifted from:
“Who are your people?”
to:
“What can you actually do?”
The emerging ideal was not equality of outcome. It was that ability should have the opportunity to rise irrespective of birth. The expansion of grammar-school education embodied that principle. A clever child from a poor family might succeed at school, enter a profession or other well-paid occupation and climb a social ladder from which an earlier generation might have been excluded.
Meritocracy therefore did not abolish privilege. It changed the ways in which privilege could be acquired and justified. Merit could itself generate privilege: success brought wealth, education, confidence, useful contacts and social standing. Those gains could then be passed to the next generation.
That is an important point because privilege is not necessarily the enemy of merit. It may be one of merit’s consequences. The successful grammar-school child might become a doctor, lawyer, businessman or civil servant and give his own children advantages that he himself had lacked. Social mobility did not destroy hierarchy; it allowed new people to enter it.
But the process introduced a familiar difficulty. The children of successful families began the next competition with a head start. Wealth could provide better schooling, leisure in which to study, useful contacts, confidence and familiarity with the manners of those already in authority. Accent, polish and education could themselves be mistaken for ability. A clever working-class candidate might therefore lose out even in an ostensibly open competition because he did not look or sound like the sort of person expected to succeed.
Rees-Mogg himself illustrates this process. His family’s position was not created out of nothing: earlier generations acquired education, professional standing, wealth and influence, and those gains became advantages inherited by their descendants. By the time privilege reaches a later generation, its origins in earlier effort, achievement and opportunity may be largely invisible. What looks like effortless belonging at the top of society can be the accumulated result of several generations climbing towards it.
This is where the historical argument begins to meet the modern controversy over diversity, equality and inclusion. Rees-Mogg accepts that privilege exists, including his own, but locates it chiefly in family circumstances, education and class rather than race. Historically, however, opportunity has been shaped by several overlapping factors — wealth, family, class, education, sex, religion, race and personal connections — although their relative importance has varied enormously across time.
The central question is therefore not whether background matters. Clearly it does. The question is what part background should legitimately play when judging an individual.
Modern equality policies raise a problem that the nineteenth-century meritocrat did not completely solve. If two candidates enter an apparently equal competition after very unequal journeys, should the distance each has travelled influence our judgement of what he or she has achieved?
There is a strong argument that it should. Someone who reaches a high standard despite poor schooling, poverty or serious disadvantage may have demonstrated exceptional ability, determination or potential. In that sense, achievement can sometimes be understood in terms of value added: not merely where a person has arrived, but how far that person has travelled.
The difficulty lies in measurement. Demonstrated progress is evidence; assumed disadvantage is not. Postcode, ethnicity, school type or parental occupation may tell us something statistically about groups, but they cannot tell us precisely what a particular individual has overcome. Once contextual factors begin to modify judgements of merit, the unavoidable question is how much weight they should carry.
Taken too far, an attempt to correct inherited advantage can therefore create another kind of preferential judgement.
The Victorian shortcut was:
“He comes from the right family and has the manners of a gentleman; therefore he must be suitable.”
A modern shortcut could become:
“This person belongs to an underrepresented or disadvantaged group; therefore that fact should itself count significantly in his favour.”
Neither proposition establishes whether the individual can actually perform the task.
Somerset Maugham’s The Verger provides an illuminating test of the problem. Albert Edward Foreman has no education, breeding or conventional qualifications. Indeed, he cannot read or write. Yet he possesses judgement, discipline, practical intelligence and commercial instinct. Dismissed because of his illiteracy, he establishes a chain of successful tobacconists. When his banker asks what he might have become had he learned to read and write, Foreman replies that he would probably still have been the verger.
Maugham turns the conventional hierarchy upside down. Society regards Foreman as deficient because he lacks the recognised signs of ability; his later success reveals how poor those signs were as measures of what he could actually do.
Crichton in Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton makes a similar point. Remove the conventions of class and place aristocrat and servant in circumstances where practical competence matters, and the servant becomes the natural leader. Both works expose the danger of confusing social position or formal credentials with genuine capacity.
Maugham is therefore not attacking meritocracy. He is attacking a narrow and socially conditioned definition of merit. Credentials can provide evidence of ability, but they are not ability itself. Neither are breeding, accent, adversity or membership of a particular social group.
Foreman is particularly instructive because he never claims qualities or qualifications he does not possess. His competence becomes apparent through what he actually achieves. That brings us back to the questions raised by the Arday affair and, more particularly, by Cambridge’s judgement. The allegations surrounding Arday and the adequacy of Cambridge’s scrutiny remain subject to investigation. But if contextual considerations or an inspiring personal history were allowed to substitute for rigorous assessment of scholarship, the error would be fundamentally different from the one exposed by Maugham.
Foreman is underestimated because recognised social and educational signals fail to reveal his genuine ability. The corresponding institutional danger is to overestimate a candidate because other signals — whether pedigree, background, adversity or group identity — are allowed too much weight.
The lesson is therefore broader than either Victorian class prejudice or modern DEI. Any social category can become a shortcut for judging the individual.
Background can properly provide context. Unequal starting points may explain why similar achievements represent very different journeys, and they may justify looking more carefully for talent that conventional measures overlook. But background cannot itself establish suitability.
A fair system should neither reward accumulated advantage simply because it looks impressive nor treat presumed disadvantage as a qualification. For any appointment, the decisive question must remain straightforward:
Does this person possess the knowledge, judgement, skill and capacity required to do the job?
The categories by which societies classify people continually change. Wealth, pedigree, class, education, race and other forms of identity move in and out of prominence as the social kaleidoscope turns. What persists is the temptation to allow the pattern of the moment to determine our judgement of the individual.
Circumstances may help us understand achievement. They cannot substitute for demonstrated competence.
