Why being upper class isn’t as much fun as you might think
With class in the headlines and royalty in my blood, I’m tempted to buy a cat to disguise my upper-class roots
Did you see that study about class this week from the London School of Economics? Headlines about class make my neck twitch with anxiety. Oh no, not another round of this, I think guiltily. Hark, is that the sound of the tumbrels rolling down my street or just the binmen?
This latest study caused the same panic, although its findings hardly come as much of a shock. Britons are fibbing about class, it reveals, and more specifically, fibbing about being working class. According to LSE, 47 per cent of Britons with professional jobs classify themselves as working class, and half of those believe this even though their own parents are middle class.
With due respect to the authors of this study, well, yes, duh. Downward aspirations have been with us for some time and it’s not just accountants from Wandsworth dredging up grandparents who toiled in the mills. It’s happening across the spectrum.
Because if you think being middle class is so embarrassing you have to hide it, try being upper class. You middle-class lot claiming to be descended from butchers, bakers and candlestick makers don’t know you’re born. Catherine Parr is one of my ancestors and she married Henry VIII. Try passing her off as a lowly seamstress.
It’s precisely because being posh is so deeply unfashionable these days that I’ve come up with cunning tricks to confuse people, a bit like Peter Sellers disguising himself as a dentist. In restaurants, I ask where the “bathrooms” are so I don’t have to say “loo”. That fooled them, I think, as I stroll into the restaurant kitchen, having been so preoccupied with the wording of my question that I didn’t listen to the waiter’s directions. Occasionally I ask people about their “kids”. I buy Yorkshire Tea. I pro- claim to everyone that I live in south-east London, which is literally miles from Fulham. More recently, I’ve mulled over getting a cat. Largely for the company but also because nobody grand has a cat. Lions and tigers like John Aspinall, perhaps, but nothing smaller than that.
One of the characters involved in the LSE study sounds similarly wary of his background. When quizzed about his father’s job, he replied that he was a “technician-made-good”, instead of an architect. Ella, another participant, talked of grandparents who were “cleaners, taxi drivers, painters and decorators”, and insisted such connections meant she remains working class, although she went to private school. She defended this school on the basis that it was “one of the small ones, quite cheap”, which is the sort of conversational dexterity which should earn her a place in the Cabinet, if nothing else.
When the poster boy for poshness is Jacob Rees-Mogg, is it any surprise that people are scuttling towards the opposite end of the scale? Etonians wipe the school from their CV, others claim to live in Hackney when really they mean Islington, and I know of a certain person who claims to be very alternative and into trance festivals but omits to mention that he holds them at his enormous house. That adage about Michael Heseltine buying his own furniture is in reverse, too. “This old thing?” one might say of a mahogany desk inherited from Granny. “Nah, mate, found it in Ikea.”