Status Anxiety

28 June 2008

I would take pleasure in driving a Chelsea tractor to the shop to buy a pint of milk

My father was a lifelong socialist. He joined the Labour party at the age of 16 and at the time of his death, 70 years later, he was a Labour member of the House of Lords. He was a fairly typical left-winger in that he preferred the company of the poor to the rich and he regarded conspicuous consumption — particularly that of the nouveau riche — as the eighth deadly sin. However, he did have one capitalist vice: he was obsessed with cars. This may explain why during his most politically active phase, when he was plotting the downfall of the ruling class, he drove a Bentley.

I was supposed to inherit that Bentley. As I sat in the back playing with the electric windows, my father would tell me to treat the upholstery with care as he intended to give me the car on my 21st birthday. Unfortunately, it never happened. The running costs rendered it impractical as a family car and my maternal grandfather refused to let my father store it in his garage. As a result, the car I was given on my 21st birthday was a second-hand Mini van.

After selling the Bentley, my father often fantasised about owning another luxury car. He would spend the weekends pouring over motoring magazines, weighing up the pros and cons of the latest models. But his socialist instincts always got the better of him and he would end up either sticking with what he’d got — an Austin Maxi, for instance — or plumping for the latest Toyota.

I suffer from the same schizophrenia. Having recently become the father of a fourth child, I now need a bigger car and am torn between buying something sensible like a Renault Grand Scenic and going for a ludicrously over-the-top SUV like a Cadillac Escalade.

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