Just because the deputy prime minister had a privileged upbringing doesn't mean he is insincere about helping others
Dear, oh dear ? the charge of hypocrisy is all over the media again. How wearily predictable. Most of us are guilty of some form of hypocrisy in the way we live and behave.
It's sensible to be aware of failure always to practise what we may or may not preach. But the self-appointed hypocrisy police are often the worst of the lot.
I'd be tempted to say here that "it's no wonder that newspapers are struggling to stay viable" except that the joys of the (mostly) free-to-access internet both explain their economic decline and demonstrate that many readers are just as eager to be hypocrisy's equivalent of community support officers.
The overnight excitement arises from the not-exactly-new revelation that Nick Clegg, coalition champion of social mobility, had a series of career leg-ups (we'll ignore his famous "up to 30" legovers here) as a result of affluent family connections.
The Guardian team sets it out with sensible modesty on page six of the Wednesday 6 April edition.
But the same story is page one news in the Murdoch family's Times (paywall) and in the Daily Mail, calmly tucked away on page 4 by the FT (paywall) which I also take at home.
The FT concentrates on the substance of the story: that Whitehall officials are to be required to open up internships beyond the informal network currently operating.
Good. I also see the Guardian has signed up to a "business compact" to make such opportunities fairer, though I have a vague notion (I do not work at HQ) that it has long ago installed elaborate fairness procedures to offset the usual informal networking.
As I pointed out here yesterday, networking operates at most levels of society, including Only Fools and Horses.
Of course, it matters most at the top. To its credit, the FT set out the bald facts. Some 70% of high court judges were privately educated, 68% of senior barristers, 62% of lords (is that real lords or lifers, I wonder?), 32% of MPs (up since the last election), 54% of FTSE CEOs and ? let's not forget this one ? a similar proportion of senior journalists.
Redtop celeb Piers Morgan spent some time in the (7%) private sector. So did Kelvin McKenzie, 80s zeitgeist editor of the Sun. When I first met Kelvin, it was much as I had feared. I really liked him.
Anyway, it's a reminder that we still have a long way to go if we are to create a proper meritocracy ? do we REALLY want one? ? where talent, hard work and commitment get their just deserts.
Do we agree that, as a society, we've slipped back these past 20 years or so? After all, three Tory PMs in a row went to grammar school. Eton is now back at No 10.
The Americans used to be so much better at this, though there is evidence there too that inequality is getting so badly out of kilter that the fabled American Dream of Clegg-ish upward mobility is in real trouble.
I suspect that's not true for the rising demographic groups, Indian, Chinese and ? especially ? Hispanic (no longer just confined to the south and west) but it is for the white working class.
Hence the Tea Party's cry of economic pain, the call of a declining force. Hence the BNP's bloke-ish appeal, Ukip's and the English Defence League's too?
But any fool can shout "hypocrite!" Today's Mail carries a piece by the Stakhanovite Quentin Letts ? sketchwriter, drama critic, diarist, pundit, family man.
It denounces the left's unelected grip on many British cultural institutions (BBC, Arts Council, etc) and contrasting it with the robust 19th century when elected parliamentarians ruled the roost.
Ignoring his preposterously sentimental view of our Victorian ancestors (who elected the squire, parson and workhouse master), the thesis sidesteps the dominant fact of our lives in 2011.
The left may have won the culture wars of the past half century, but the right dominates economic practice at almost any level.
It's not as if the Daily Mail itself is a spent force in our popular culture either ? more influential at the BBC, for instance, than either the BBC or the Mail would care to admit.
Even the Guardian, the secret arbiter of all evil that appears on TV in the Mail's view, is occasionally guilty of hypocrisy, so they tell me.
But hey, here I am falling into the trap I complained of.
Flicking through Wednesday's edition I find it the usual bundle of contradictions which make it such a successful newspaper. Hypocrisy? Well, I suppose so, but live and let live.
Just because Nick Clegg had a privileged upbringing doesn't mean he's not sincere about trying to spread the benefits, hard though it will prove in practice, as Labour ? whose policies he is borrowing ? discovered.
He might have been wiser to place an article in the Mail last week setting out his past in almost as much detail as the Mail does.
"Look, I know what I'm talking about, I am a product of these privileges," he might have said.
Who knows, the Mail's editor, Not-Sir-Paul Dacre, who sent his own boys to Eton but is Britain's top hypocrisy policeman, might have been kinder.
But those of us who are not saints (very tiresome people, saints) fall by the wayside.
Did I not read that militant leftwing trade union leader, Bob Crow, still lives in subsidised social housing despite taking a �145,000 a year salary from the RMT? I did ? in last weekend's Sunday Times.
Does that make him a hypocrite or a man loyal to his working class roots and community, scornful of faddish talk of upward mobility?
A bit of both, I'd say. But he's not as bad as hellfire preachers who make a fat living from the sweat of the poor or ambitious cardinals who close their eyes to paedophile priests.
And wasn't Steptoe & Son a family rag and bone firm?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/apr/06/nick-clegg-hypocrisy-michael-white-blog
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