A case against the posh brigade
F. Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong; it’s not the rich who are different from you and me — it’s the posh. There is no social act so rude or outrageous that it cannot be explained and then excused on the grounds that the perpetrator was posh.
I was recently at a drinks party and saw a man scratching his bottom in front of the buffet table — a full, hand-down-trouser buttockscratch. With the very same hand that he’d used on his bottom, he picked up a sausage, examined it and put it back in the pile. He then picked up another sausage and put it back. Then, after another quick bottom-scratch, he began to poke around the samosas.
The thought that maybe it was inconsiderate to indulge in bottom-scratching and sausage-hunting with the same hand never occurred to this man. When I confronted him with the antisocial nature of his actions, instead of reacting with acute embarrassment and a profusion of apologies, he just laughed and went off, no doubt, to fondle other bits of party food.
I informed our hostess about what I had witnessed, adding, “He must be totally pissed!” But instead of sharing my sense of concern she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Oh no, he’s not pissed. He’s just posh.”
It’s amazing the way middle-class society will make excuses for the bad behaviour of someone whom it believes to be posh. If a guest is drunk, makes a pass at your wife or your teenage daughter, vomits all over your sofa and passes out on your living room floor, it’s perfectly Ok — as long as he’s posh.
I know this because I know a man who did just that at a dinner party a year ago — and not for the first time.
And when it comes to crazy, people adore a posh girl who is bonkers. A friend wanted to fix me up with just such a girl he had dated. “She’s completely mad — you’ll love her,” he said.
I told him, “I’m finished with crazy women.”
“But this one is different. She’s crazy and posh.”
“You mean she’s a better class of lunatic?” “Exactly!” My friend then regaled me with supposedly hilarious tales of the woman’s antics that proved her poshness. They included setting fire to his bedsheets, peeing in his sink and slipping his mother a tab of ecstasy.
What I object to is not the bad behaviour of these individuals so much as the double standards of posh apologists. It is the snobbery of the social climber who indulges the posh and condemns the rest of us that grates.
How are we to explain this privileging of the posh? After all, we like to think that we are becoming a more meritocratic society, one that refuses to confer special rights and privileges upon any one class or social tribe. Consequently, we all have to play by the same social rules.
Another reason is that the middle class fear that should they object to the anti-social antics of the posh they will expose themselves as middle-class, “bourgeois” or, even worse, “suburban”.
Many metropolitan middle-class people envy what they see as the insouciance of the posh. To be middle-class is to live in constant fear of saying and doing the wrong things. We are always apologising for the most minor of mistakes or mishaps. The posh, on the other hand, are totally free of such social anxieties or regrets.
Imagine going to a dinner party and causing a blockage in the host’s toilet. It’s the great middleclass social nightmare. The next day they would send a vast bouquet of flowers and a letter begging for forgiveness, offering to arrange for a plumber and paying for his fees. A posh person would just send a card saying, “Lovely evening. Thanks. x”
The posh are celebrated for this sort of “insouciance” — but this is just a fancy word for being a selfish, self-centred and thoughtless d***head.
It’s ironic that in our post-Brexit Britain, where the people — their wishes, their views — are now sacrosanct, we hear very little talk about the upper class. We moan a lot about the “metropolitan elite” but we are blind when it comes to the outmoded sense of entitlement, the unjustifiable privilege and the licensed bad behaviour of people who just happen to be well-born. By arrangement with the Spectator