Is this a country riven by class hatred? I don’t think so. If anything,
Britain seems more at ease with itself, class-wise, than it has ever been.
Nobody is expected to know their place any more because we no longer have
“places”. Foreign travel, exotic food and designer labels are enjoyed by
people of all backgrounds. Which makes it all the odder that opponents of
David Cameron have become so obsessed with his upbringing.
The Daily Mirror uses the words “Tory toff” as a prefix almost every time the
Conservative leader’s name appears. Imagine if The Daily Telegraph used
“Labour oik” before every mention of John Prescott. Inverted snobbery is
just as offensive as traditional snobbery. Since nobody chooses their
parents, it is as unfair to tease someone about their class as it is to pick
on them for being black or ginger-haired.
Yet now the attacks on Cameron are coming from the Tory Right, too. This week,
Peter Hitchens, a fanatically conservative columnist, presented a Channel 4
programme that even called itself Cameron: Toff at the Top . Hitchens is
miserable because Cameron has embraced social liberalism, which he despises.
Now he has no one to vote for. Poor chap.
But his complaint that politics was now being fought entirely on the centre
ground was intertwined with an assault on Cameron’s privileged upbringing,
as if the two were somehow connected. They are not, of course. Plenty of
aristocrats are as right-wing as Hitchens. I met one recently who was
scandalised that Cameron had praised Gandhi. “A man in a loincloth! I ask
you!” she declaimed, sounding spookily like Lady Bracknell. Perhaps I should
introduce Hitchens to her — they would get on famously.
Or maybe not, if Hitchens genuinely hates privilege as much as he affects to
on television. For in his programme, he couldn’t resist jibes about
Cameron’s Eton and Oxford education, his marriage to an heiress, his
membership of the Bullingdon Club and, later, White’s. Cameron, claims
Hitchens, “is trying to portray himself as an ordinary dad trying to juggle
family and work. He’s nothing of the kind.”
But the fact is that Cameron is the father of a baby, a toddler and a severely
disabled four-year-old, and has a working wife. When his first son was
small, he brought him along to meetings in a Moses basket and bottle-fed
him. This wasn’t ostentatious New Mannery but what you do when you are
having to share the care of a fragile child with a wife who also has a
demanding job. Where Cameron went to school has no relevance to the family
pressures he faces now.
Like any parent of a severely disabled child, he knows every corridor of his
local hospital and has frequently had to sleep there on the floor next to
his son’s cot or bed. He has been forced to negotiate the minefields that
are social services and special schools. If that doesn’t put you in touch
with the world, I don’t know what does. And I don’t imagine that Hitchens
has had the misfortune to become so brutally acquainted with Britain’s
public services.
If Cameron were arrogant, boorish and dismissive of people who were socially
“beneath” him, then complaints about his up-bringing would have more
traction. There certainly are some toffs like that. But it would be unfair
to include him among them.
According to a new biography — Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative by
Francis Elliott and James Hanning — there were a few people who found the
future Tory leader arrogant when he was young. Yet others claimed quite the
opposite. Here is a recollection from Steve Rathbone, a state-school
educated North Yorkshireman who went to the same Oxford college. “He was
clearly an Etonian, but he wasn’t swaggering around in a braying, Sloaney
way. Equally, he wasn’t trying to be something he wasn’t. He never tried to
adopt an estuary accent, as many students do from major public schools, or
wear right-on trendy clothes. He was a good mate of people from very
different backgrounds.”
The birth of Ivan, with all the difficulties it brought, seems to have had a
profound effect. One colleague told Cameron’s biographers: “This was a real
leveller.” And a friend remarked that Ivan’s handicap had given Cameron
“more humility”.
John Major, who could be notoriously chippy with posher colleagues, never
displayed this trait with Cameron. The current Tory leader has the knack of
putting people at their ease, whoever they are. As the French say, he is
bien dans sa peau , which means that others feel comfortable in his presence
too.
While the Tory leader’s accent is still clearly upper-class, he does not come
across as snooty. And, like another public schoolboy, Tony Blair, he has
immaculate manners. My hunch is that, beyond the core Labour vote, any
attempt at playing the class card against Cameron will backfire. If Labour
reverts to class warfare, the tactic will alienate more aspirational
floating voters than it will attract.
Snobbery of any kind — inverted or otherwise — is not nice. And if there is
anything more ingrained in British society than the class system, it is an
attachment to the principle of fair play.
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
In praise of older women
Recently, I wrote a column about the disappearance of older women from
television. Their male contemporaries, such as Michael Parkinson, Sir Trevor
McDonald and Alan Titchmarsh, are allowed to continue as national treasures,
but women, in the main, get locked away in the safe or exiled to radio not
long after their first wrinkle appears.
Now it is Moira Stuart’s turn. This serene newsreader used to do all the BBC’s
morning bulletins. Then she was restricted to the Sunday ones on Andrew
Marr’s programme. Now she has lost that job too. A fine reward for 25 years’
service at the Beeb.
According to the newspapers, she is only 55, younger than Jeremy Paxman. Her
Who’s Who entry does not even have a date of birth: perhaps she saw this
coming. But when will the BBC learn that at least half of its viewing public
want to see some women of wisdom and maturity on their screens, and not just
bimbos who play pertly and prettily to the older men who sit next to them?
We female viewers feel insulted by the airbrushing out of our gender after a
certain age. The BBC is a public-service broadcaster and it makes great play
of consulting its licence-payers. Perhaps the corporation would deign to
listen to us on this?
Tricky question
After a lunch with the former Tory Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, before
his disgrace, he presented me with a signed copy of his (rather sympathetic)
biography of Richard Nixon.
Soon a rival biography of Nixon will be published by Conrad Black. What could
Aitken and Black possibly have in common that explains their affinity with a
wicked, dishonest but clever politician?
