Alwyn Turner's compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power. They hoped, he suggests, for a new elite based on talent, but that instead: ‘The dominant strand of culture that emerged in the 1990s was very anti-elitist, as expressed through the National Lottery, reality television, the internet and the celebration of Princess Diana and David Beckham’ (574). In bracketing Diana and Beckham, Turner blurs two conceptions of class: one, that of some vaguely understood but easy to concede aspect of ‘quality’, that both might exhibit due to supposed gifts of grace and beauty, or sporting prowess; the other, the division of a population in terms of socio-economic position and status. While both Diana and Beckham were certainly celebrities (the focus of the following chapter), and therefore drew upon the cachet that such status conferred in the 1990s, in British terms the son of an East End kitchen fitter and a hairdresser came from a very distinct and discernible social class than the daughter of British nobility, who seemed destined to become Queen of England.