Читать книгу Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England - Nick Cohen - Страница 7

IN VERY GOOD, JEEVES, Bertie Wooster’s behaviour is so distracted his Aunt Dahlia has no choice but to suspect him of being in love, a fact he confirms.

‘I do indeed love.’

‘Who is she?’

‘A Miss Pendlebury. Christian name, Gladys. She spells it with a “w”.’

‘With a “g”, you mean.’

‘With a “w” and a “g”.’

‘Not Gwladys?’

‘That’s it.’

The relative uttered a yowl.

‘You sit there and tell me you haven’t got enough sense to steer clear of a girl who calls herself Gwladys? Listen, Bertie,’ said Aunt Dahlia earnestly, ‘I’m an older woman than you are—well you know what I mean—and I can tell you a thing or two. And one of them is that no good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys.’

She was right, as aunts invariably are. Life is short and there is not time to ignore collective wisdom. Bertie should have remembered what had happened to other men who had fallen in love with girls called Gwladys. He should have seen the ‘Stop!’ sign and jammed on the brakes. His aunt could not prove in advance that associating with this particular Gwladys would bring certain ruin, just as you or I cannot prove in advance that our prejudices are always justified. But put it like this: if you resolve never to be judgemental, and to treat everyone as innocent until they prove themselves guilty beyond reasonable doubt, the odds are that your savings will vanish into a Nigerian bank account.

Class hatred once provided the ‘Stop!’ signs of the left. If you were invited to entrust your money or your heart to someone who was rich, you would instinctively know to make an excuse and leave because leftish custom held that no good could come of the relationship. The gut reaction against the wealthy was based on three reflexes.

1 Economic. Excessive wealth leads its holders to expect to get their own way whatever the rules say and whatever damage is done to others.

2 Political. No just country can be created while extremes of wealth persist.

3 Aesthetic. The wealthy are vulgar. They waste their money on the art of the Chapman brothers or the fashions of John Galliano and use their domination of taste to silence the little boy who says the emperor has no clothes, or, rather, has gauche and ill-fitting clothes.

Today, class hatred has fallen into disrepute, along with race hatred, homophobia and all other forms of prejudice. It is easy to see why. If my employers were to send me on a class-hatred awareness course, I would have to admit that there was no logic to my bigotry.

Recently we spent the night at a country house hotel. It was a mistake—we were way out of our league. Leaving behind menus announcing that a pot of tea with cake was the price of the weekly shop, I took my son to the swimming pool, where I met a challenge faced by generations of parents. Changing rooms are potential death traps. The wet, tiled floors all but invite red-blooded toddlers to crack their skulls. But at some point you must put them down and get changed. Fortunately, mine ignored the enticing opportunities for self-harm and contented himself by playing with the locker keys.

A kindly American looked on. ‘What is it with boys and keys?’ the old man asked. ‘My grandson’s just got to have the keys. Mind you, they’ve got to be the right keys or he throws a tantrum. The keys to the Merc, the keys to the yacht, the keys to the plane…’

I should have said, ‘You know, mine’s just the same!’ I glared at him instead. Why? Whom did I expect to meet in a hotel for the super-rich? Postmen? The American was friendly and may have made his money with a product that had done nothing but good for the human race. What sense was there behind my scowl?

Some of my friends from university have dedicated themselves to a life of poorly rewarded public service. They’re no better or worse than they ever were. Others went into the City and made a fortune. They’re still the same people and still friends. By the standards of most people in this country and the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, I am rich. But I would be shocked to be hated as a result.

Class prejudice appears thoroughly discredited. It is now commonly deployed de haut en bas by the powerful against the powerless. I’ve lost count of the number of times that big business or the BBC or New Labour have condemned their critics as ‘elitists’ who arrogantly want to overrule the democratic decisions of the marketplace. This line of reasoning reached its nadir when Tessa Jowell denounced opponents of her plans to let casino operators fleece gullible punters as ‘snobs’. When the wife of Silvio Berlusconi’s lawyer can use the language of class struggle to defend the favourite business venture of the Mob, I think it is fair to say that socialism is dead.*

Even before it came to power, I realised New Labour had a reckless streak when newspaper diarists reported that Lady Carla Powell had befriended Peter Mandelson. Not only was she a society hostess and the wife of Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, but her husband asserted that ‘Powell, should be pronounced ‘Pole”. This was as glaring a warning as a girl called Gwladys. Anthony Powell might have been a greater novelist if he had not wasted so much time correcting people who called him ‘Powell’ instead of ‘Pole’. Sir Charles’s brother, Jonathan Powell, was Tony Blair’s chief of staff. He pronounces Powell ‘Powell’, thank God. On the day he switches to ‘Pole’, the merger of old Tory and New Labour will be complete.†

Ever since the party stepped out with the wealthy, it has been beset with scandals. After every one of them, I wondered what Labour politicians thought they were doing when they accepted donations from and invitations to dinner with Bernie Ecclestone, the Hinduja brothers, partners in Arthur Andersen, Enron executives and Lakshmi Mittal. Did they truly believe that predatory capitalists wanted to talk about the politics of the progressive coalition? Did no alarms ring?

To be fair, a folk memory of socialist propriety occasionally troubled them. During the Hinduja affair,* Peter Mandelson told the head of the New Millennium Experience Company: ‘I agree that they [the Hinduja brothers] are an above-average risk, but without firm evidence of wrongdoing how could we bar them from involvement in sponsorship?’

Mandelson was right, strictly speaking, but he missed the wider point. The billionaires strongly denied accusations that they had been involved in corrupt arms sales to India and no court had found them guilty beyond reasonable doubt of any offence. But if you see billionaires facing accusations of playing a part in an arms scandal, you are under no obligation to start worrying about the burden of proof any more than you are obliged to hire a plumber your neighbours have warned you is dodgy. Why not just smile politely and cross the street?

The same question haunts David Blunkett’s infatuation with a woman who appears to have been the result of a union between a diamond mine and a hotel chain. If the name ‘Kimberley Fortier’ wasn’t warning enough, then her job as publisher of the conservative Spectator ought to have told a Labour minister that the fling could not end well.

The fault may have been with Blunkett’s civil servants, who perhaps skipped the fashion pages when they read the morning newspapers to their blind master. They may have thought that the Home Secretary had more pressing matters to concern him, and missed the piece in which Fortier described how she used the pull of her husband, the publisher of Vogue, to jump a nine-month waiting list for an £11,000 Birkin bag. He ‘moved heaven and earth to get her a Birkin within two months,’ reported the Observer, ‘sneaking her into the shop one night after closing to allow her to examine the bag, only to have her say: “It’s the wrong one. It’s light brown. I want the dark brown one.”’

If it is bigoted to pass on the pleasure of such company, then good taste is bigotry

In years to come historians will conclude that New Labour had a fatal weakness. It lacked a wise aunt to save it from itself. There was no one to collar ministers and bellow, ‘David, you sit there and tell me you haven’t got enough sense to run a mile from a girl who calls herself Kimberley Fortier?’

New Statesman, December 2004

* Tessa Jowell was the Labour minister who pushed through the deregulation of gambling. Her husband, David Mills, set up offshore trusts for Silvio Berlusconi in the early nineties. Italian magistrates investigating tax fraud and money laundering tried to prosecute him. They were suspicious because one woman was a director or company secretary of nineteen of the companies. It is hard enough for the most qualified woman to manage nineteen companies; harder still when the woman in question was a single mother from an East End council estate.

† After this piece appeared, Charles Powell wrote to me to explain that although his pronunciation of ‘Powell’ could sound like ‘Pole’ to the careless listener he in fact called himself ‘Pohwell’. He was perfectly entitled to do so. His family was from Wales and his paternal grandfather pronounced ‘Powell’ as ‘Pohwell’, as many in Wales do to this day. Far from being a snob, his grandfather was a clergyman who despised the vanities of this world. Jonathan Powell began life by pronouncing ‘Powell’ as ‘Pohwell’ but slipped into ‘Powell’ as his career advanced. On this reading, the affectation lies with Jonathan for adopting the blokey pronunciation ‘Powell’ the better to fit in with the compulsory informality of the new establishment. But maybe not. It is easy to get lost in this country’s class system.

*The Hinduja brothers—Srichand, Gopichand and Prakash—were Indian billionaires, who, like so many other rich men, based themselves in London because of the tax breaks Gordon Brown gave the wealthy. They sponsored the Faith Zone in the Millennium Dome and announced that they believed in ‘multicultural and interfaith understanding, tolerance and respect between the different people and their faith’. As the cynical would expect, the promoters of understanding, tolerance and respect were also involved in the supply of military vehicles. While New Labour was trying to raise funds for the Dome in 1999, the Indian authorities were accusing them of being involved in a corrupt arms deal. They claimed the charges were politically motivated, and an Indian court threw them out in 2005. Tony Blair sacked Peter Mandelson from his government in 2001 after press claims that Mandelson lobbied on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, who was seeking British citizenship.