To me, grandee goes together with Tory. So it was a surprise to find Lord Mandelson called a Labour grandee in recent reports. The Sun even called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ‘Grandee Andy’, though that spoils the original joke of calling party bigwigs grandees as though they were the truly grand grandees of Spain.
At the last count, all but one of the 153 dukes in Spain were grandees, as were 264 other nobles. Grandees were exempt from paying tax, but so were hidalgos, whose numbers were reckoned by 1683 to have reached half a million.
I got my daughter Veronica to search a database for references in the national press to Tory grandee in the past year. She found it applied to 31 men and one woman, Dame Priti Patel. Those mentioned more than once included Lord Heseltine and Sir Iain Duncan Smith. The phrase implies having been deep in the counsels of the party, and suggests high social status, though Lord Redwood and Sir David Davis were brought up in council houses. Others include Lord Clarke of Nottingham, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, Michael Portillo and Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Does the journalist Danny Finkelstein count? Lord Ashcroft is a mover and shaker but no parliamentary party figure. Is our own Lord Gove still a grandee, now that he commands a height in the fourth estate? Boris Johnson was called one, as was his father, Stanley, which hardly seems accurate. Among the dead, William Whitelaw, Rab Butler, Michael Ancram and Lord Tebbit figured. In the Independent, Sean O’Grady mentioned that ‘Menzies Campbell was a finely tailored politician who dressed like a Tory grandee.’ This takes us back to an observation by the late Alan Watkins (who coined the term young fogey in The Spectator in 1984): ‘The typical Conservative grandee tends to wear a dark blue or black suit, with chalk- or pin-stripes, what may be called a White’s Club suit.’ The stripes have gone. Even Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg’s double-breasted suits are plain. Today’s grandees are of a different stripe from those of yore.
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