Damian Thompson once again tells it like it is ... well done!

Dave and George think the middle middle classes are common. But we'll take our revenge on election day

By Damian Thompson Politics

 

Even Margo won't be voting Tory this time

I spent the first 20 years of my adult life trying to conceal the fact that I didn’t go to public school. I wore the same striped shirts and bespoke suits as my posh friends. I ruthlessly expunged the words “lounge” and “serviette” from my vocabulary. Twice a year I endured the suffocating boredom of a country house weekend. By my thirties I could “pass”, as they once said of light-skinned black people pretending to be white in the Deep South.
This week I realised that I’d had enough. It’s time to embrace my heritage, because my people – the ones I snootily turned my back on for decades – are under threat. From a Tory Prime Minister and his Chancellor.
I’m not upper middle class or lower middle class. I come from the ranks of the middle middle classes. Think The Good Life: Tom and Barbara Good, Margo and Jerry Leadbetter.
And yes, I know that Penelope Keith’s Margo was an embarrassing social climber, and let me make it clear that the only person in my family who remotely resembled her was me. But we middle middle classes are aspiring by nature, and haven’t been taught elegant ways of concealing it, unlike a certain sort of ex-public schoolboy.
I’ve never met Cameron or Osborne, but I know their type. As a pathetically insecure grammar school boy at Oxford, I had my nose pressed up against the glass, enviously watching the air-kissing and listening to the guffaws. Years later, I found myself – occasionally – invited to the same dinner parties as these people, but it was never more than “passing”.
If you’re not a proper toff there are only two ways into those circles: you have to be very rich – like George Osborne, whose family baronetcy and huge fortune only just wipe out the stain of going to a day school, St Paul’s; or very good-looking, like the Latymer-educated “Hughie” Grant, as he was known in my day.
There’s a reason why Cameron and Osborne can’t shake off the public school tag, and it’s not Lefty rhetoric or the chippiness of the electorate. Both men grew up in the company of utter snobs. Even Proust would have been hard pushed to capture the depth of their friends’ contempt for the middle middle classes.
How much of it has rubbed off? Put it this way: I bet if you were to drop the word “Rotarian” into conversation with Dave or George, they wouldn’t be able to stifle a smirk.
Let’s see if they’re still smirking after the general election. Disastrously, Osborne has been persuaded that families whose incomes hover around the £60,000 mark are “rich” for tax purposes (though still beyond the pale when it comes to supper invitations).
Also, Cameron has a long history of forgetting to say thank-you to party activists, who overwhelmingly come from the middle middle classes. Soon it will be payback time, as Tory MPs – many of them also victims of Dave’s rudeness – are only too well aware. To quote Nadine Dorries this week, policy is being run by “two public schoolboys” who don’t understand being short of cash – “and what’s worse, they don’t care”. Nadine is a maverick, but this time she was speaking for many backbench colleagues.
Come election day, an awful lot of retired men in blazers will be enjoying a leisurely game of golf rather than ferrying old ladies to the polling station. When they reach the 19th hole, they’ll pour themselves a G and T and say: “Looks like Labour will get back in, doesn’t it?” And then they’ll shrug their shoulders and go back to talking about cruise holidays or some other subject that our one-term Prime Minister finds amusingly common.