How does one become a grandee?

How does one become a grandee? I should like to be one though I am not quite sure what they are. I do not necessarily want to be the Spanish type though. But the only other type I know is the Tory grandee and politics, my childhood ambition, would never have done for me as a career, and even if it had I do not think I would have made it to grandee. 

I think being a grandee might require a voice like the late Sir Ian Gilmour's, which Frank Johnson wonderfully described as sounding like a Mercedes crunching over private gravel. Maybe too a library of old editions with a balcony running round it and outside the sound of distant gunshot, but I am not sure. Is William Hague a grandee?

I should like to combine being a grandee with being a socialite, but don't know how to become one of those either. I wonder if the internet will teach me or whether I shall have to add to the list of books I want to write: How to be a Grandee and How to Be a Socialite. The only way to learn about something is to write a book about it.

I would never give up my beloved country, but had I not drawn the winning ticket in the lottery of life and been born English, Spanish would be my second choice. They had an empire, they have as much gravitas as we have and a melancholy authority, a monarchy and an aristocracy as good as ours and, what we do not have, a very long history of reaction. (I am not myself really exactly a reactionary but am drawn to a country where they were forced to bring back the Inquisition after the restoration of the Bourbons because public opinion demanded it. However a left-wing friend, who lives in Madrid, says Spain  is not reactionary at all any more but very liberal.) 

But I would miss so many things from England, starting with the most beautiful countryside in the world, the best dressed and most stylish men in the world and steak and kidney pudding and... Irony, of course. Fantasy. Eccentricity. I would once have mentioned freedom, but this no longer seems the apposite word. I would never have mentioned tradition, for we are a singularly untraditional people, unlike the Spanish.

When I think of stylish men, the most stylish I ever knew was the late Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, but he of course was half Spanish.

Actually, I am sure the English and the Jews are the two greatest races in the world and the Spanish are not extremely close behind in the greatness scale, being slightly back numbers to be frank, but I do not think being Jewish would suit me at all, even though I am brainy and bad at sports. Though I would be happy to retire to the Old Town in Jerusalem and think about Ultimate Things one day. Until a few years ago I certainly wanted to live all my life in Bucharest and more precisely in the Old Town in Bucharest where I do live, but the new Old Town is not the same.