Much was made, in advance, of the fact that Samantha Cameron was at last speaking in public. She did it on Sunday night, interviewed by Trevor Mcdonald — very well, and in a surprisingly old-fashioned way. She looked lovely when she said that she was proud of her husband and that it would be ‘an honour’ to be married to a Prime Minister. But what the pre-released publicity did not prepare viewers for was Mrs Cameron’s accent. It was perfect estuarial. The words ‘really, really’, for example, came out as ‘reelly, reelly’. I could not detect a hint of the tones of her father, Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th baronet. Sam could have passed herself off as a call-centre worker from Essex, or a weather forecaster, without exciting suspicion. This must have required effort. Mrs Cameron was once a slightly bohemian art student, so you would not expect her voice to be cut-glass; nevertheless, she has not spent all her adult life with that accent. Just as Mrs Thatcher developed a voice which effaced all traces of Lincolnshire (except, famously, the word ‘frit’), so Mrs Cameron has made the same effort for self-improvement, but in the opposite class direction. In his preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘…for the encouragement of people whose accent cuts them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins on the flower-girl is neither impossible nor uncommon.’ He did not foresee that this would still apply when ‘high employment’ requires that you appear downwardly rather than upwardly mobile.
By the same token, I noticed, our editor was billed on the programme as ‘columnist, News of The World’, his embarrassingly grand job not mentioned. And when the camera moved along the rows of ordinary Tory workers, it lingered lovingly on the extremely black face of my friend Kwasi Kwarteng, who has been selected for the safe seat of Spelthorne. Kwasi’s shameful secret, not revealed, is that he is an Etonian.
The Trevor Mcdonald programme did labour the point about David Cameron being ‘posh’. Jonathan Freedland, of the Guardian, came on to say that Mr Cameron’s Eton education could not help him to understand how ordinary people live. If you look up Mr Freedman in Who’s Who (where, by definition, ‘ordinary people’ do not reside), you find that he was educated at University College School, London, and Wadham College, Oxford. What insights into ‘your poor, your huddled masses’, are provided by Hampstead, Oxford and the Guardian, which are unavailable at Eton? It is true that our rulers nowadays are extremely cut off from the ruled, but this is not because they are drawn from the aristocracy (most of them aren’t), but because they are a metropolitan political/media class financed to an astonishing degree (look at the salary of Mark Thompson of the BBC, look at the MPs’ expenses scandal) by the rest of us.
Another part of this class is made up of university administrators, particularly vice-chancellors. It turns out that many of them are earning huge salaries — over 80 of them getting more than the Prime Minister. Top of the list among those universities which are overwhelmingly dependent on public money is University College, London. Professor Malcolm Grant, the Vice-Chancellor (recreations: ‘electronic gadgets, opera, woodlands’) gets £404,272. It was at UCL that the Detroit ‘underpants bomber’, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was a pillar of the student Islamic society. Professor Grant got publicly furious at the suggestion that his university should be concerned about the extremist speakers who address the society, and invoked freedom of speech. In another triumph for free speech, UCL students prevented the Officer Training Corps of the British army from recruiting on campus. Professor Grant gets more than twice the salary of the head of the army, by the way.
I was interested by Matthew Parris’s suggestion in last week’s Spectator that, since banks now lend so dear and pay so little to their depositors, we should cut them out and start lending to one another. For more than a year now, my ‘High Interest Bank Account’ has paid me a rate which appears on my statements as ‘0.000 per cent’, so a similar thought had occurred to me. If Matthew’s plan were to take off, it would revive the custom by which people ‘lend their name to a bill’ on behalf of a friend. This is the staple of many a 19th-century novel, and always adds an exciting twist to the plot, since the lender or, more rarely, the borrower, is then blackmailed/cheated/ruined. Despite the benefit to fiction, I doubt if the change would be a good one. It is a sad fact of human nature that lenders often come to dislike their borrowers, and vice versa. One of the reasons that we have banks is to transfer our dislikes on to them. It is the one role they fulfil remarkably well.
A reader from the West Country gets in touch to share a problem which is widespread in the Church of England. What can be done in a parish where the incumbent is unpopular? In the village in question, the priest-in-charge has so alienated the parishioners that the following have given up their duties: the treasurer, the head of the pram service, the entire choir (now performing at a neighbouring church), the organiser of the flower rota and most of the flower arrangers, both licensed servers, three members of the Parochial Church Council, the relief organist, two youth workers, one acting verger, the weddings clerk, many of the readers and most of the worshippers. Clerical uselessness is not, of course, a uniquely Anglican phenomenon, but the inability of the authorities to do anything about it is. What happens, typically, is that the bishop and the archdeacon wring their hands when complaints are made, and do nothing. Eventually, the unpopular clergyman departs from natural causes. Then the authorities, exclaiming with surprise that the church now has a very small congregation, close it down. But things are changing a bit: now that parishes often have to pay the vicar’s stipend themselves, they have more power. In Kent recently, I hear, one parish was so dismayed by the clergy who reached them through the official process that they advertised for a priest themselves, found a much better man, and forced the diocese to accept him.
A final, sad footnote to this business of getting on by getting prolier. Friends whose son applied for Oxford recently feared that the selectors would be against him on class grounds, and so, rather than giving their main, grand address, they filled him in as living at ‘Keeper’s Cottage’ on their estate. Although a star pupil, he failed all the same.
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