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Sunday 7 September 2008

Britain just got Weller: meet the Jam Generation

Anne McElvoy talks to the politicians reared on the 1980s music of the Jam: post-Cold War, disenchanted with state monopolies, and cagey about Class A drugs

The shadow chancellor George Osborne counters that Mr Brown is ‘stuck in a 20th-century timewarp’, though I suspect a lot of the electorate still feels a bit 20th-century too. Charles Clarke makes the point well that ‘It is not always polite to remind the electorate that you’re younger than a lot of it is. I don’t think it is evident that David Cameron or Nick Clegg will be able to appeal to large sections of the British electorate, because their experience on grounds of age alone isn’t wider — you see John McCain coming through in the United States, who’s really quite elderly.’

Are the new breed any different from, say, the last great generational shift from Kinnock to Blair or, indeed, the rise of the Cambridge Union Tories — Howard, Patten, Portillo, who took over from the knights of the shires in the 1980s? They share the same sense of being a super-educated elite — not just largely Oxbridge but a lot of Firsts too. ‘They do make me feel a bit red-brick,’ confides one successful media executive.

The difference between this lot and their ambitious predecessors is that social and ideological eclecticism is written into their DNA. They have mix and match views, as they do cultural tastes. Take Mr Cameron’s formative musical years, which could come from any self-respecting leftie’s record collection: ‘“Going Underground”, “Eton Rifles” — inevitably, I was one — in the corps — it meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t see why the Left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs.’

Is there nothing safe from the expansionist New Tories? Cameron loves Kirsty MacColl’s ‘New England’ and adds, ‘I’ve got dozens of Bob Dylan albums. Some of his lyrics you can agree with . . .’ Not ‘Blowing in the Wind’, I take it.

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