The first arrest of the weekend at Badminton Horse Trials occurred at 7.17 p.m. on Saturday. Fight, separation, removal, detention, escape, capture, arrest. Things had accelerated in the preceding hours on the Duke of Beaufort’s estate. With the day’s eventing over, there was nothing to punctuate the drinking and the drugs. Attendees gathered at Lakeside – an enclosed boozing zone on the grassy, tented banks of a 600-foot-long pond – and consumed until nightfall. ‘Badminton is the best event of the year,’ said Ollie, a late-teen boy familiarising himself with the attractions. ‘Fanny, beer, horses – what else do you want?’
There is some disagreement about which event marks the beginning of the traditional social ‘season’, but Country Life says it is Badminton, and I trust them, so I went. We live in a Britain today whose political relationship with the posh has rarely been as hostile – hereditary peers extracted from the Lords, taxes thumped on inherited farms, VAT forced on private schools… I wanted to see how they were holding up. I was curious whether in Badminton our upper class would be defiant or in retreat. Had they turned on Britain? Had the government killed their season? Was posh dead?
OK. No. Posh isn’t dead. It’s not even yellowing. At Badminton, in fact, posh was on fine form. Saturday was the cross country day, and I arrived at Badminton at 11.00 a.m. via Chippenham and Tiddleywink and Kent’s Bottom. I climbed the estate’s driveway, was overtaken by a man in a fedora on an electric scooter, and entered at fence seven (two log piles) before arriving at the Deer Park, next to the pond, the locus of it all. A large drone with a camera swept through the clear sunny airspace overhead as Badminton Radio 87.7 FM chirped from nearby speakers: ‘There is not a country in the world that is better on a day like this.’
From the vantage of the Deer Park one saw the trials in all their abundance. The first sight were the masses, or, technically, was the mass. It was a single thing, really, a replicating bundle of kids in Schöffel gilets. The boys paired theirs with mullets and mod cuts and Ralph Lauren and checked shirts, and the girls went simple: long hair, skirts, dresses, tall boots and Le Chameau wellies.
The Schöffels shuffled about the course. Among their sameness, it was easy enough to spot some well-known, un-uniformed adults. The Japanese Ambassador, Hiroshi Suzuki, was in attendance with his wife Eiko. He wore a tweed jacket and electric blue cords and carried a Paddington tote bag. He told me that they were at Badminton for pleasure, not business; Eiko was a keen rider. Later I spoke to Clare Balding, presenting at Badminton for BBC Sport. As a child she dreamt of performing at the trials. ‘I love it here!’ she said. In a pondside pavilion, the chef Thomas Straker lounged in a T-shirt.
The course spread east from the pond, and westward lay the trade stands. If posh was on the out, its economy would be cracking. But this is not happening. I left the Deer Park for the expanse of vendors, for Welligogs, Hazy Blue, Kate Negus, Laurie & Jules and Emily Cole. (These were company names, not people I met.) At Stevenson Brothers, Beau Goodenough introduced himself. Stevenson Brothers sold rocking horses at a start price of £2,500, going up to around £10,000. It was their 32nd year at Badminton. Their largest model was five-foot tall. It was designed for adults. ‘Mark Stevenson, the owner, does 15 minutes on a rocking horse every day,’ Beau said.
The trials, in short, were a place bereft of shame. There was no posh withdrawal here. Not aesthetically, anyway. But something didn’t sit. Saturday at Badminton is the second most attended day of British sport in the calendar. Only Sunday at Silverstone beats it. These people could not all be kingly rich. Clare and BBC Sport wouldn’t be here if they were. Not any more. Not in 2026. The visitors were Lochlans, Rafikis and Daisies, but also Lewises, Joshes and Chloes. Badminton was an event for Britain’s ever-powerful middle class to present as rich. It makes a funny dichotomy. The government is waging political war against the posh, but socially, it hasn’t translated. The middle class still aspire to wealth. The posh remain unabashed.
The posh and its aspirants were getting along quite nicely
At Lakeside in the evening, the two forces came together. It was being rumoured that there was a three-hour queue to enter the enclosure, almost up to fence 11, so the kids just broke in. Picket fences were hurdled and barriers torn apart. At 7.11 p.m. an ambulance arrived, and at 7.17 p.m. came the first arrest. By 7.30 p.m. various people were crying. The son of Paul Tapner (Badminton winner, 2010) kindly gave me some advice: ‘You’ve got to go round, get into the water, wait until they’re not looking…’
Inside the enclosure, the posh and its aspirants were getting along quite nicely. I met Mahara and Chloe, who had driven up from Totnes and were planning to camp, unofficially, in their car in the car park, and also some locals who were ‘on the bag’. I had a long talk with Lewis from Lincolnshire, a polite student at the Royal Agricultural University who had a bottle of red wine in his pocket. ‘It’s a great opportunity for everyone to get together, you know, from quite different backgrounds,’ he said. ‘It’s a great opportunity for people to dress up.’
