In the preface of his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw famously wrote: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”
He was referring, of course, to that perennial English obsession: class. That was over a century ago, when class was clearly stratified and identifiable by social connections, money, clothes and, perhaps most obvious of all, accent.
Things have changed over the years, although not that much. Two of Britain’s past five prime ministers went to Eton College (the elite private school for the upper classes) and a third to Winchester College (ditto). (The other two were women who did not attend elite schools.) It’s a similar story among judges, barristers, generals, investment bankers and in just about any job that carries power or wealth.
And yet there are so many nuances, exceptions and deceptions in the British class system that even long-standing foreign-born citizens like my wife, who has lived here for a number of decades, sometimes struggle to understand the complex social matrix.
One complication is changing accents. It used to be that the powerful and wealthy would take great pride in the supposed refinement of their pronunciation.
But nowadays, it’s not uncommon to hear members of the ruling class verbally slumming it, with dropped aitches and conspicuous glottal stops. The trend has been accelerated by a growing awareness of, or self-consciousness about, the benefits that privilege confers.
In politics, the whole drama of who you are and where you’re from has become more performative in recent years, particularly in the Labour Party, which has struggled to hold together a fragmenting alliance between the university-educated metropolitans and its traditional working-class base. This social pantomime reached its climax when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
Corbyn grew up in a country manor house and went to prep school – two solid markers of striking privilege – yet presented himself as if he’d spent his life shopping in second-hand clothes stores. The fashion was adopted by many of the young, privately educated idealists who gathered around him.
In a sense, Corbyn, who hasn’t changed his style or opinions since about 1973, was ahead of his time. Everybody nowadays is looking to downplay their leg up in life. While making a great noise about the evils of white privilege, the white privileged somehow always point the finger of blame at others, never at themselves, because they’ve taken good care to curate a backstory that passes as “street”.
A conspicuous exception is the present Labour leader and former director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer, who genuinely grew up poor. He has never tried to make capital out of his underprivileged background. But a new biography shows he really did have it tough, the second of four children living with a disabled mother and difficult father in the kind of down-at-heel conditions few of his peers have ever experienced.
Yet curiously, Starmer is loathed by the progressive left. That’s partly due to his centrist politics, but I suspect it’s also because he doesn’t want to play the role of the working-class hero, and that makes many radical poseurs uncomfortable, perhaps reminding them of their inauthenticity.
Barring a catastrophe of historic proportions, Starmer will be the next prime minister. He needs only to continue breathing to win by a landslide.
His critics say he’s too dull, uncharismatic and devoid of ideas. All I can say for sure is that when he opens his mouth, I don’t hate him. And it will be cheering in this age of manufactured identities to have a leader who is more focused on where we’re going than where he came from.
