The recorded voices of Baldwin, or even of Anthony Eden, have narrow vowels that have almost entirely disappeared today.Now the very nursery of the culture, the public school, no longer imposes the old uniformity. Powerful Scots have mostly reverted to educating their children in Scotland And in England itself, another reversion is under way. The upper-class young already talk ‘Estuary English’, the faintly Cockneyfied accent of the South-east. When the children of privilege in a multi-national state turn to speaking with the accent of one province, the ruling culture is breaking up.So the awful question arises: what will be left of Britishness? A state, a flag and armed forces recruited from every part of ‘Ukania’ will survive But these are just institutions. What will remain of Britishness as a social reality rather than just a citizenship? There was only one British class, only one culture which incarnated the idea of the United Kingdom, and it is dying.It will be a slow death. Most English people still react with deference to the sound of RP. This was the theme of the protests when Liz Forgan decided a year ago to encourage regional accents in the BBC, and depressing experiments showed that audiences find a talk in RP more reliable and credible than in West Midlands ‘Brummie’ But the change has begun.

At worst, it means Britain will remain just as class-obsessed but that top people will speak Estuary or Milton-Keynesian. At best, it could mean a quite different society in which a voice carries authority by its words, not its vowels I will find it harder to understand that voice But a miracle is worth the price of a deaf-aid.. I NOTE with an interest not untinged by sheer horror that the Rolling Stones are ‘on the rod again’, as the showbusiness correspondents are wont to put it. Once again, the spectre of the 1960s (dread decade]) raises its unkempt and ill-shorn head. My own memories of the Sixties will be of singular interest to those of the younger generation who might imagine that every last one of us under the age of 40 was engaged solely in hectic bouts of ’sleeping around’, punctuated only by occasional bursts of ’shooting up’ and ‘letting it all hang out’. Letting all what hang out, may one ask? And the only proper response to whatever reply was vouchsafed would be, ‘Well, put it back in again then, this minute.’
The Sixties started quietly enough. I remember first hearing Mr Russ Conway tinkle the ivories in his inimitable fashion in the first week of January 1960, and thinking to myself that perhaps the forthcoming decade would not be so very ghastly after all.

But then so many of us were full of high hopes in those early days. In the February of the same year, a select group of us youngsters – John Gummer, Alfred Sherman, John Julius Norwich, Norman Fowler and myself – were invited by the Duke of Edinburgh to a round-table ‘think tank’, there to thrash out the likely shifts and trends of the coming decade. Our predictions were indeed varied – Norman was sure that the bowler hat was in for a major revival. Sherman thought that there was a definite move among the young towards Ludo and Charades. I myself predicted that the popularity of television would prove just another fad, and Gummer foresaw a sharp rise in personal cleanliness – but few of them, alas, completely hit the mark.