Henry Fairlie - Fleet Street

Fleet Street

In 1950, Fairlie joined the staff of The Times, rising at an early age to become the chief writer of its leaders on domestic politics. In 1954, he gave up the security of that post to assume the greater independence of a freelance writer, which he remained until the end of his life. As the author of the "Political Commentary" column in The Spectator, first under the nom de plume "Trimmer", then under his own byline, he helped define the modern political column.

In September 1955, Fairlie devoted a column to how the friends and acquaintances of Guy Burgess and Donald Duart Maclean, two members of the Foreign Office widely believed to have defected to Moscow, tried to deflect press scrutiny from the men's families. He defined that network of prominent, well-connected people as "the Establishment," explaining:

By the ‘Establishment’, I do not only mean the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially.

The term was quickly picked up in newspapers and magazines all over London, making Fairlie famous. The Oxford English Dictionary would cite Fairlie's column as its locus classicus. However, he would later determine that Ralph Waldo Emerson had really been the first to use "the Establishment" in this fashion.

As Fairlie became better known, his personal life grew chaotic. He drank heavily and conducted a series of extramarital affairs, including one with the wife of his friend Kingsley Amis that nearly ended their marriage. Never responsible with money, he amassed thousands of pounds of debts. And in 1965, he insulted Lady Antonia Fraser on television, leading to a libel suit against him and the I.T.A.. That year, he visited America for the first time, and fell immediately in love with the country. A few months later, he moved there for good.