Class warfare rears its ugly head
Background of Britain’s leaders puts them at odds with general public
David Cameron and Boris Johnson — who between them govern Britain and its capital, London — were photographed together in 1988 as members of an obscure university drinking club for rich Oxford kids. Dressed preposterously in specially made tailcoats, they are staring off into the middle distance, like something out of Brideshead Revisited.
The existence of such a photo would seem strange enough to a foreigner, evidence at least of a powerful clique. Add to that the fact George Osborne, who runs the country’s finances, belonged to the same club a few years later, and it is hard not imagine an upper-class conspiracy.
Received wisdom says this is fanciful, clichéd thinking, but as class warfare bubbles up across British politics, received wisdom is looking shakier by the day.
Like Johnson and Osborne, Cameron is what the British call a toff, or sometimes a hooray, a self-satisfied member of the ruling class. He has been mocked for thinking “LOL” means “Lots of Love” in an email, but you can be quite sure he has always known “PLU” means “People Like Us,” the upper-crust code of exclusion.
In the Sunday Times, whose former political editor Isabel Oakeshott wrote Call Me Dave, the new book that has revived tales of Cameron’s campus debauchery, cartoons often have the British prime minister as a rosy-cheeked boarding school prefect, with Osborne at his side, relentlessly bullying their “fag,” or servant, Nick Clegg, leader of the Conservatives’ former coalition partner Liberal Democrats, who is always humiliated in his shoe-shining subservience.
Social class is the easiest caricature of British public life, and for good reason. It is everywhere, like a national Downton Abbey. It informs the present by tethering it to the past, turning a politician into a person, linking public career with private narrative. For Cameron, class is what transforms 10 Downing St. into a pied-à-terre for the man whose country home is near Chipping Norton, the Oxfordshire village that is mocked as the centre of modern British upper-class social life.
The reported pig ritual in which Cameron allegedly took part while a member of the Piers Gaveston, another louche Oxford drinking club, upends this easy understanding. It threatens Britain’s good-natured attachment to the mirage of social class divisions. It makes them seem real, visceral, ugly, returning un bidden like an old bad habit. Maybe nothing has changed.
There are parallels across the political spectrum, from the surge in rightwing, working class, nativist anger that floats Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party, to the resurgence of socialist class warfare that has seen Jeremy Corbyn, the very opposite of the three-time winner Tony Blair, installed as Labour leader and Cameron’s only plausible current challenger.
You can object to the reported pig ritual on grounds of dignity, hygiene, even animal welfare, despite the fact it was dead. You can criticize it as an affront to Britain’s nose-to-tail revolution in dining, in which no bit of the beast is wasted.
But the real problem with the claim that Cameron once violated a dead pig’s mouth is that it means he might really be as his worst enemies imagine — the sort of person who is so wasteful that he and his rich, drunken, well-fed mates would get a dead pig just so they could defile it for gags. The real fear is his class caricature might be real.