Defining yourself these days as ‘upper class’ is the kiss of death in every walk of life

30 January 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

The problem with ‘street cred’ as a cloaking device is that it fools no one. Indeed, it risks antagonising those whose hostility it seeks to defuse by treating them like idiots. Thus, Tony Blair was criticised for introducing glottal stops into his speeches in an attempt to disguise his upper-middle-class background; Harriet Harman is often ridiculed for trying to sound less posh than she is.

David Cameron’s efforts to conceal his origins are more sophisticated. Instead of vaulting from one end of the class spectrum to the other, Guy Ritchie-style, he has merely taken himself down a single notch. He lives in an unostentatious house in North Kensington, helps his wife with the childcare at the weekends and potters about the house in trainers. The message couldn’t be clearer: ‘I’m just an ordinary, middle-class dad.’ Unlike more aggressively ‘street cred’ types, Cameron’s pose is sufficiently plausible to persuade the electorate he’s one of them. The same Guardian/ICM poll revealed that 57 per cent of voters think the Tories stand for the middle classes, compared to only 48 per cent who say this of Labour. Perhaps that accounts for the Conservatives’ 11-point lead.

The curious thing about Cameron’s middle class-ness — and this is true of other members of the Tory party who would have defined themselves as ‘upper class’ 55 years ago — is that it isn’t a pose, at least not in any straightforward sense. In his own eyes he is a meritocrat, not the beneficiary of inherited privilege. And in a sense that’s true. He had to take common entrance to win a place at Eton, sit another exam to get into Oxford, do well enough in his Finals to land a job at Conservative Central Office, persuade the Stafford Conservative Association to adopt him as their parliamentary candidate — and so on. Not exactly a cakewalk.

However, while he’s undoubtedly had to work hard in order to get where he is, it doesn’t follow that he’s a genuine meritocrat. After all, the pool of 13-year-old boys he had to compete with to get into Eton was restricted to those whose parents could afford the fees. Again, when he applied to Oxford he wasn’t competing on a level playing field: 46 per cent of Oxford students were educated privately, compared to 7 per cent of the UK population. And the fact that he is married to the stepdaughter of Viscount Astor can’t have hurt his prospects in the party.

Yet, in keeping with the tenor of modern Britain, he would never define himself as ‘upper class’. In politics, as in every other profession, it’s the kiss of death.

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Minnie Ovens

February 8th, 2010 11:20am Report this comment

The major problem with the dissolution of a class system is that it will always be replaced by another.
It's what human beings do.
So the system based upon socio-economics, in other words a manner of life, with its ethics and moral principles, no matter how shallow, has been repplaced by one which is based upon money, clebrity and little in the ways of manners, morality or principle.
You tell me which is best although, personally, I find it a bit repellant that Guy Richie is so unsure of himself that he has to dumb down.
After all, he is a success in his own right.
He doesn't have to become his own characters.
Oh, and by the way, the new class system is just as out of bounds to you and me as the old system.

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