The common touch

Or, how aristocrats manage to keep on being aristocrats - with the assent of everyone else. From the June 7th issue of The New Yorker, a description of Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats party in Britain, which recently formed a coalition government with the Conservatives (Tories):

He has also mastered one of the most important British upper-middle-class skills, that of seeming less entitled than he is. He has the nuanced understanding of class dynamics which comes from having a great-great uncle who was murdered by his own peasants.