‘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.
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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