To have had a blue-collar job before becoming a politician in this country is still so rare and incredible that it is enough to be a defining feature for ever
Once, when I was at Cambridge (university, not a day trip, although, as we shall see, it was the latter to which I was better suited), I ended up, through a series of misunderstandings, at dinner with a group of students from another, much more emphatically, proudly and determinedly public school-intaking college. Thus I found myself embroiled in conversation around a mahogany table with a dozen young, overconfident men for what looked like being a very long evening indeed. (And when I say embroiled in conversation, I mean being regaled with tales of boarding school japes/borderline sexual assaults and listening to monologues about the state of the nation and how they were going to solve the country's problems when, in the fullness of time ? or the very first election after graduation, as most of them seemed to think ? they took their rightful places in the cabinet. I spent much of the evening trying to think what the collective noun for "knobjockeys" might be. "A fat turd of" didn't seem quite right, nor "a twunt". I finally settled on the prosaic but accurate "a college", and got back to drinking.)
Eventually, talk turned to lighter subjects and one of the college started braying about the terribly amusing thing he had seen at his sister's A-level art exhibition. Someone had taken a picture of "hah pahrants' plummah's barthrum" ("her parents' plumber's bathroom" for those not attuned to the upper classes' distaste for consonants), which contained ? now steady yourselves ? a fleecy red toilet (or, rather, lahvahtorah) seat cover. "Ay mean, er my Goood, why? Ebslooty hidjus! Bluddy ruDUCulus!" They all, loudly, agreed that it was both baffling and risible. Fortunately, as the granddaughter of a woman who owned a blue fleecy version of said item, when the noise died down I was able to explain. Namely that it was to enable people who did not have bathrooms big enough to allow room for a chair ("A what?" "Ah chaah") somewhere to sit or put a foot on to facilitate drying manoeuvres without freezing their extremities or ahhses off.
There was a stunned silence. I like to think that this was because there were a dozen world views shifting, ever so slightly, round the table. But I'm pretty sure it was just the dawning realisation that one of the lower orders had been accidentally invited to sup at entirely the wrong table.
I think of Fat Turd College every time I read an article about Alan Johnson, which of course have become even more numerous since his resignation as shadow chancellor after revelations of his wife's alleged affair with his bodyguard. Not one of them manages not to refer to his former career as a postman, and only a few manage to do so without that mixture of bafflement and mockery I remember from that dinner.
I think of the twunts' table every time I read about university fees of �27,000 being imposed or about the education maintenance allowance being abolished or about all the libraries being closed, or about any of the thousand and one other barriers to social mobility being thrown up by people who don't even know what a toilet seat cover is, or even what it might be for.
This country is extraordinary, and extraordinarily depressing. It's depressing that to have had a blue-collar job before becoming a politician is still so rare, so incredible and at some level still so ruDUCulus that it is enough to be a defining feature for ever and make you a lifelong curio to colleagues, opponents, press and public. That the country can be run by people about five years older, but otherwise exactly like the knobjockeys I sat with that evening 15 years ago makes me want to cry, hard. And then stab things, including myself, harder.
Although if the next iteration of Tory ministers does cap the price of or exempt bathroom accessories from VAT, at least I will know that my living was not entirely in vain.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/29/alan-johnson-common-politics-uk
Dick Cheney Barack Obama George Soros Aung San Suu Kyi Queen Elizabeth II
No comments:
Post a Comment