Wanted: Some meddling kids, a Great Dane and... Shaggy
Growing up I was a huge fan of the Scooby Doo cartoons. There was something about knowing that no matter what the bad guy did they would always get caught and unmasked.
I loved hearing the famous ‘I would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids’.
Britain is a bit like that, except the unmasking happens the moment you discover that beneath everything in this country is class privilege.
Just look at Boris Johnson. Throughout his political and journalistic career, he’s been caught out yet still manages to escape the consequences.
He was sacked when working as a trainee journalist at The Times for fabricating quotes from his own godfather. For anyone else that would have been career-ending yet he was soon back in employment at the Daily Telegraph. If he was working class with a regional accent would he have landed another national media job?
But Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson went to Eton and Oxford, so there was no grand unmasking, no pesky kids, just the ability to waltz into yet another top newspaper.
I started mentally composing this column as my thoughts on class privilege crystallised while watching the statement on the Sue Gray report.
The prime minister breaking the Covid rules he had enforced on the rest of the country, the example of him and his leadership team letting people in Downing Street believe they could party and ignore the rules. For anyone else, you’d hope they’d resign out of shame, show real contrition instead of making crude jokes ‘Sir Beer Korma’, for example.
People sacrificed so much, didn’t say goodbye to loved ones, yet these jokers thought they were above the rules because we live in Britain, a place perfectly engineered for posh white blokes to soldier on no matter what.
Perhaps I have a massive chip on my shoulder. But once you, like the Mystery Gang, pull the mask off the monster and see what is underneath, you can never go back.
This government, heck this whole damn country, might look like a zombie endlessly stumbling forward but strip that away and you’ll find the eternal face of class privilege.