Climate change has become a proxy subject for people who just want to sound off

12 December 2009

Hugo Rifkind gives a Shared Opinion

I know Alistair Darling had left Loretto School, Musselburgh (for Aberdeen University) shortly before Andrew Marr had arrived (en route to Cambridge), but it was still odd to see the pair of them on my television last Sunday. Odd, I mean, that neither mentioned that they’d been to the same top Scottish public school, even though they were discussing whether it mattered that David Cameron had been to an English one.

I was at that Scottish school, too. Decades had passed, though, so our paths didn’t cross. I remember Marr coming back once, to give us a talk on how we could all become editor of the Independent. Alas, none of us yet has.

Darling was altogether more distant. There was a story, probably apocryphal, about a group of boys on a school trip to London spotting him across the central lobby of the House of Commons. The teacher approached, it was said, and asked if he’d mind coming over to say hello. Darling, legend has it, took one look at these clear-skinned boys in their bright red blazers, considered his position on the Scottish left, and legged it. I suppose it might well not be true. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer fancied writing to The Spectator to point out that he’d be entirely happy having a public chat with his fellow old boys from the fourth-poshest public school in Scotland, I suppose I could look quite the fool. He was a Marxist afterwards, you know. Or a Trotskyist, maybe. I forget.

Drawing battle lines at PMQs last week, Gordon Brown had David Cameron dreaming up policy on the playing fields of Eton. I’m trying to imagine that pair on the playing fields of Loretto. Marr I see as a wiry flanker; lots of tape around those ears. Darling must have been in the back line; one of those drop-nosed, radish-kneed types, in an extra shirt against the cold. In my fanciful mind, I like to think of him once having had a moment of glory. Maybe it was during the annual grudge match against nearby Fettes, in which he brought down a lad called Anthony Blair with a wimpish yet surprisingly effective tackle. Fettes is the third or even second poshest school in Scotland. People who went there were almost grand enough to pull birds like Harriet Harman.

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Snowman

December 11th, 2009 6:53pm Report this comment

Being of a low status myself (not in Cambridge, not even in the last of the poshy Scottish public schools, well, not in bloody anything that smells of better class, refinement and stuff like that), I had to defer to my master’s wife Baroness Pipino.

She, of the higher rank, glanced through the piece. ‘Snowman’, she exclaimed, ‘invite the young boy for tea, will you’.

Having perused the musings some more, she muttered in a voice of drumly disposition: ‘Will have to explain to the aspiring dear that ‘left’ is a put-down because one associates with the left nothing but failures. Don’t they teach this any longer at any school?’

And if I may add to it, humbly and respectfully, a polite question for Master Rifkind on the certitude of science: Could you please remind a member of the great unwashed how many dead bodies were supposed to line the streets from the 2nd wave of the swine flu pandemic prophesized by the Chief Medical Officer to hit us about now?