‘Samantha is actually very unconventional,’ said David Cameron, a few months ago. ‘She went to day school.’
I first saw that the other day, quoted in an article by the Independent’s Johann Hari. I love it. I can’t think why I hadn’t come across it before. It’s not quite up there with Jacob Rees-Mogg at his best (‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about my nanny. If I had a valet you’d think it was perfectly normal’), or Guy Ritchie’s voice, or the way Prince Harry’s girlfriend dresses, but still, it’s a corker of the genre. I go weak for this sort of thing. People pretending they’re not posh is almost as funny as people pretending they are.
The thing is, though, when I say ‘funny’ I mean ‘funny’. I don’t mean ‘unbearably offensive and a reason to beat them to death with a shovel’. And I suspect this means that I could never, whatever I thought politically, be comfortable on the left. Hate just isn’t a part of my politics. Disdain, contempt, dislike, sure, I can manage them. But hate, no. I don’t really see the point.
On the left, you have to hate a lot. A few months ago, I interviewed Dan Hannan, the blogging MEP. This was shortly after he’d described the NHS as ‘a 50-year mistake’ and, in return, been described as ‘a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, foetid excuse for a prick’ by the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker. ‘It’s what the left does,’ said Hannan, who is slap-headed, certainly, but seemed none of the rest. ‘They don’t think, “he’s wrong”. They think, “he’s plainly a wanker”.’
The article in which I found that quote up top, the Johann Hari one, was an extraordinary thing. I don’t know Hari, but I admire his columns, even when I don’t agree with them. This one, though, was foamingly odd. Starting from Cameron’s background, and his social circle, and those hilariously blinkered things he had said about his wife, it drew a straight line to his policies. ‘Is it any surprise he makes policies that serve them,’ he wrote, ‘not us?’
To be clear, it’s not just that Hari doesn’t think Cameron is right in all he wants to do. He doesn’t even think he’s honestly wrong. He thinks he’s an evil cynic, whose primary purpose in standing for election is to ‘take money from the hard-working majority of Brits, and hand it to his friends and relatives on landed estates and in tax havens’. This is mad. Proper mad. Tinfoil hat mad. Protocols of the Elders of Zion mad, as though there were a secret society of poshos at the heart of the Cameron project, passing the port in a bunker under Notting Hill, and sniggering ‘Rah, rah, rah, we’re going to smash the oiks.’ Clever people can only think like this when the hate comes first.
The Guardian gave us a taste of this sort of thing during London’s last mayoral election, when it devoted a whole supplement to how awful Boris Johnson was, on the basis of his floppy hair, his bicycle, and his love of quoting Latin. They wheeled out a whole phalanx of suitable semi-famous Londoners, every one of whom would probably sooner die than go a week without Waitrose or latte, and they all shared a self-congratulatory shudder about how unrepresentative this old Etonian was of the people they thought probably lived on the estate next door. It was one of the clumsiest, crassest, most cringe-making things I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. It’s the hate. It’s a handicap. It makes you nuts.
One could, of course, sustain a softer objection to the posh, and claim that somebody of Cameron’s background would be inevitably blinkered to ‘normal’ Britain, and congenitally unable to act in its interest. That ‘day school’ quote could give some credence to that, offensive as some may feel the notion is. But why should it only be true of public schoolboys on the right? Why not think it of Sir Anthony Wedgewood Benn, or the old Etonian Tam Dalyell?
Moreover, if you’re going to dismiss people on the basis of their limited life experiences, then you might also have to discount the views of an Oxbridge graduate who has never had a job that wasn’t ‘newspaper columnist’. Only I’m not sure Johann Hari would be so keen on that. Still, Wikipedia tells me he went to a day school, so I suppose he’s seen the world.
Very weird experience the other week. I was in Umhlanga, in Durban, for a friend’s wedding, staying in this quite odd apartment complex overlooking the beach. South Africa feels a bit raw at the moment. Not like it’s about to erupt into race war or anything like that, but just as though it’s heading in a bad direction and knows it. The leadership of the ANC, as far as I can make out, has effectively given up on any sort of commitment to the ‘rainbow nation’. At best, they want to run a black African country, with minorities in it. And someday, I suppose, they will.
The old, white authoritarian South Africa, though, lingers on in the strangest of ways. Our flat had a tumble-dryer in it, but at 30°C in the shade, using it felt like a crime. So the morning before we left, I went out on the balcony and hung up a few pairs of damp pants.
Two minutes later, we had a phone call. All I know is that it was from somebody in a position of authority. ‘It hez been brrrought to ourrr attention thett you are henging clothes,’ she said, grimly. ‘These are against rrrrhegulations and must be rrrhemoved.’
Seriously. Two minutes. In Britain, if somebody minded you hanging out washing, they’d quietly smoulder about it, or maybe stick a note in your letter box the next day. I thought of the massive, repressive state security system that used to exist here, keeping race from race, smothering dissent. Then I went out on the balcony.
I looked up. I looked along. I peered over the edge. From our balcony, I could see no other windows or balconies, which meant that nobody else could see us. So we must have been denounced by somebody from down on the beach, or in another building altogether. Anonymously. In three minutes. It’s sort of terrifying.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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