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

‘The basic principle of English social life is that everyone thinks he is a gentleman,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh. ‘There is a second principle of almost equal importance: everyone draws the line of demarcation immediately below his own heels.’

That was written 55 years ago and today almost exactly the opposite is true. According to a Guardian/ICM poll published earlier this week, almost no one in contemporary Britain sees themselves as ‘upper class’. The pollsters didn’t ask the respondents to define ‘upper class’, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of people draw the line of demarcation immediately above their own heads. In the course of my life I have come across dukes, marquesses, earls, lords and baronets, as well as princes and princesses, and yet I have only once heard someone call themselves as ‘upper class’. It was such a shock I almost fell off my chair.

These days, being perceived as posh — or, worse, being perceived as someone who thinks of themselves as posh — is deeply unfashionable. I first detected this trend at Oxford in the mid-1980s, where a significant minority of upper-class students began to talk like stage cockneys. I remember one occasion, during the miners’ strike, when I spotted the son of a hereditary peer rattling a tin outside McDonald’s and asking passers-by to ‘spare a few coppers’ in the voice of a Dickensian pickpocket.

At the time, we dismissed this behaviour as ‘street cred’, but in retrospect it was clearly more than a passing fad. They sensed that the majority of undergraduates, being state school educated, disapproved of inherited privilege and camouflaged themselves in order to avoid being stigmatised. ‘I’m with you, comrade,’ was the message they wanted to convey.