Why all the denials? The prime minister will be judged on his policies, not on his youthful past
The prime minister's nemesis popped up last Friday. It's his Bullingdon Club self, native to Oxford University, circa 1987. It was conjured by Evan Davis on the Today programme, with the sort of question that sane journalists call "mischievous" and mad ones call "class war". Is there any likeness, Davis asked, between the recent riots and the sometime antics of the Bullingdon Club, a "youthful gang that engages in violent behaviour", of which Cameron was once a member? (Bullingdon Club behaviour, for those who don't know, is wearing mustard waistcoats to smash up restaurants). "We all do stupid things when we are young," said the prime minister, and this is true. But the outcomes of stupidity are different in Oxford and Brixton. Some go to jail for stealing bottles of water, and others spend a single night in the cells, before being plonked back down in a college quad.
Since he became leader in 2005, Cameron has sought to deny where he comes from, which is specifically the English gentry. It's the upper-upper-upper middle class, if you have a fetish for such distinctions, just a small bray away from the real aristocracy, my favourite member of which is Lord Glasgow's son David, whose money-making idea on the reality TV show Country House Rescue was to decorate his father's castle tower with graffiti. I mention that to demonstrate the unfitness of the real aristocracy to govern ? they are either Hapsburg odd, or busy running catering businesses. You can hear it in Cameron's vowels, especially if you listen to him on tape. He speaks in long, slow, I-can't-really-be-bothered-to-get-the-words-out globules, which only people who are always listened to would use. They are indigenous only to Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and toffs.
But still he acts like a man on death row for poshness. No, I am not a member of (top people's club) White's. No, I did not wear a tailcoat to my sister's wedding, even though everyone else did, and someone mistook me for a valet in my lounge suit and asked me to park their car and mix them a mojito. No, I was not photographed outside my supporter's Central Casting Plutocrat's Mansion. No, my wife is not posh either ? she went to a day school and she does not wear designer clothes, preferring a Lidl sack. No, I do not shoot small animals because I love the way rabbit blood reflects the sky. This is a strategy that dates from his earliest days as Tory leader. The copyright for the famous Bullingdon Club photograph has been withdrawn, possibly at the instigation of his office, like a narrative bump in a naff spy novel. He has rubbed his background away. No Posh.
Why? Does the prime minister fear that, should his poshness be definitively proven, perhaps on ITV1 on primetime Saturday night, in a sort of X-Factor style trial, with the ghost of his ancestor William IV as one witness, and his supposed black friend from Oxford ? who I think runs a Jamaican restaurant ? as another, the people would rise up and execute everyone who has ever worn anything mustard? Would it be over for the "big society", if we knew it was a rich man's small state fantasy?
It is obvious that the prime minister equates wealth with morality, and poverty with barbarity. During the election campaign he defended inheritance tax by saying that people who had saved and did "the right thing" should not be punished, which presumably means that if you have not saved, you have done the wrong thing and you should be punished, and will be punished. This theme segued into the Today interview. Cameron failed to condemn Bullingdon violence, daft as it would sound to do so: "I condemn all acts of violence against property by teenagers dressed as 18th-century footmen". He placed no emphasis on the MPs' expenses scandal, the banking crisis or the cuts as a cause for popular rage.
But he is wrong to run from his Bullingdon self, even if watching him do it is the only fun to be had in British politics. He misjudges the British electorate, if he thinks we care if he was born in a rectory, a stable or a life-size Sindy Mansion that has sprouted, magically, out of the fairy grass of Weybridge.
The Labour party rejected any election material that starred Cameron as a Hellfire Club toff, replete with shotgun and syphilitic prostitute, when polling revealed that people really didn't care. He will be judged on his policies, and as for his background, well, everyone has something they would rather forget. Now why, as he flees from his nemesis, looking back like a man being chased by an abyss with floppy hair, doesn't someone tell him that?
No comments:
Post a Comment