The return of Lady Muck

My sainted mum was of untarnished working-class blood — she worked, variously, as a cleaner, factory hand and shop assistant — and like most women of her kind who grew up before the 1960s, she never swore. Not a ‘bitch’, ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ ever passed her lips, though she certainly loathed a lot of women and always had at least two feuds on the go. In her eyes, using words like that would have made her just as bad as the targets of her disapproval. No, her ultimate diss for females she disliked was ‘Lady Muck’.

It’s a delightfully descriptive phrase and, having heard a lot from both Emily Thornberry and Emma Thompson recently, I’m surprised it isn’t more popular, because Lady Mucks move among us as much as ever today. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the type as ‘A woman who thinks she is very important and should be treated better than everyone else’ and you’ll know her when you see her — or even better, hear her. That voice! That oleaginous, am-I-speaking-slowly-enough-for-you-thick-little-plebs-to-understand, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice.

In politics, you can currently hear this voice from the two most prominent Lady Mucks in the Commons (how the name of their workplace must pain them!). Diane Abbott, with her vast pomposity, hypocrisy and sense of entitlement, has shown us that women of all hues can make it to Lady Muck status, whereas previously many of us presumed it was a white woman thing. But if Abbott is something of a busted flush on the opposition benches, her sister under the hyper-sensitive skin, Emily Thornberry (aka Lady Nugee — two times a lady, then) is surely a rising star, despite her forced resignation a few years back for the fantastically Muckist act of tweeting a working-class driveway displaying the England flag and a white van during a by-election in Kent, for all the world as though she had spotted a fascinating new species of sub-human being.