I’m mildly posh – nowhere near David Cameron posh, for example, let alone the Olympian heights of Brian Sewell, but I’m unlikely to ever play a football hooligan or an East End gangster in a Guy Ritchie film. And I’m better spoken than I was as a teenager, when I used to affect a slight Mockney accent with a mild Jafaican inflection, as is the case with most Londoners born after about 1976. Not as bad as some of my contemporaries, but enough to sound like a bit of a berk.
One day, as our gang was walking down that notoriously deprived inner city street, Holland Park Avenue, I heard an almost comically plumy voice cry out: ‘Edward West! You were at my prep school!’ It could have been like the scene from Donnie Brasco where Joe Pistone is recognised by an old friend. There would be me, whispering to my old schoolmate as I beat him up: ‘Shut up! I’m undercover, I’m pretending to be working class!’ Instead I just mumbled something in my stupid-sounding urban patois, aware that he must have thought I was a complete prat. Which, of course, I was.
But at least I was a teenager and not the 45-year-old leader of the opposition on the cusp of becoming the 75th prime minister of Great Britain. I know that Ed Miliband’s mockney accent isn’t the most important thing about his interview with Russell Brand, but there’s something culturally significant about it.
The whole point of putting on a mockney or jafaican accent is to sound stupid, or at least uneducated. It’s an accent that says the speaker is streetwise, down-to-earth and not worthy of resentment. When I was at school, people might be picked on if they were well-spoken, so they tried to sound working-class or black. The counter to all this was pressure from those in authority to speak properly, especially given that one of the best ways to promote social mobility was to teach state school kids to speak proper.
But those in authority are now as embarrassed of their background as any 15-year-old; even those in charge of the country. The RP accent has fallen out of favour in recent years largely because RP represents a social order that has fallen out of favour. It has been replaced by the leveled-out accent of the new Establishment – Tony Blair’s transatlantic D’s, Ed Balls’ blokishness, and now Ed Miliband trying to downplay his origins in London’s Marxist intelligentsia to pretend to be as ignorant as Russell Brand’s fans.
Accents were once used as a way of differentiating the right people from the wrong people, socially, but political attitudes now have much the same function in determining whether someone has nous; Eliza Doolittle would today shock London society by saying something off-colour about immigration.
Incidentally Russell Brand’s particular brand of agitation is nothing new; back in the 12th century London’s disillusioned were moved to agitation by one ‘William with the long beard’, a charismatic speaker who inspired ‘a powerful conspiracy, inspired by the zeal of the poor against the insolence of the rich’. In those days, of course, you couldn’t choose not to vote and the authorities rather looked down on this sort of agitation, and it ended badly for this humble soldier – who was, in reality, a university-educated Anglo-Norman called William Fitz Obsert.
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