This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column I once worked out that I was lower-upper-middle-class. I was of course using an old-fashioned pre-metric scale, a fine old mechanism of brass and polished wood which could spot a dropped ‘aitch’ at a thousand yards, and which vibrated angrily whenever anyone put the milk in the teacup first. These days I suspect all you need to do is check the colour of your credit card and the size of your car. Probably there’s an application on one of those flashy toy telephones that everyone seems so keen on which can judge your class status to within a thousandth of an inch. Maybe this is why David Cameron thinks that being middle-class is about having sharp elbows and using them. He is plainly a bit (but not very) guilty about doing this himself. It was back in January 2008 that he first defended parents who used sharp elbows to get their children into church-run state schools, something he could be said to have done himself. Now, while readily accepting that he and his wife are in this group, he seems to be saying that such parents are getting more than their fair share of public services – which is a bit much given the enormous, penal taxes they have to pay. Well, I’m not at all sorry to harp on about this, as most of the supine, power-worshipping media of this country never mention it. But Mr Cameron is personally extremely wealthy and yet was for years one of the greediest claimants of the special MPs’ housing benefit, under which the poor were robbed to give to the rich. And by wangling his offspring into a rare high-quality state school, Mr Cameron has elbowed a poor family out of a good education for their children, when he could easily have afforded to pay fees and leave the places free for someone less fortunate. I do not know why Mr Cameron behaves like this. Maybe it is because he thinks he can get away with it. Maybe he’s just mean. Maybe he thinks it will gain him political advantage. But I don’t think there’s anything middle-class about elbowing other people out of the way. On the contrary, a proper middle class is based on virtues – including patience, thrift and self-denial – that are pretty sharply contrary to that. Go to modern Russia to see what it is like to live in a country where such a class does not exist – just a grossly rich, tasteless, uncultured top layer and the struggling millions beneath. And that is what is coming here. Anybody who follows the outmoded rules of self-restraint will be elbowed out of the way by flashy Cameron types whose tailoring is as smooth as their morals are crude. The middle classes were once a body of people who attained a good life and a modest place – but not riches – through conscientious hard work and honest dealing. Now the expression is abused to mean those who take what they can get, and pay later – if at all. I know a lot of people rather prefer this, thinking the old arrangement was ‘repressed’ and so forth. But whether you like the new way or not – and it is plain Mr Cameron does – it certainly isn’t conservative. I’ve tried to like the BBC’s 21st Century Sherlock Holmes. And I have to concede that the idea is clever and the choice of actors – especially Benedict Cumberbatch – is quite brilliant. But in the end it is wrong. While one or two people may be persuaded to go back to the books, most won’t. The TV version, if it succeeds, will become the accepted one. The authentic detective will fade into obscurity, elbowed out of the way by a funky Dr Who figure – Sherlock Wholmes. And this will be a terrible pity. Because those who still read the originals know that they are in fact works of imaginative genius, which cannot really be separated from the Victorian and Edwardian England in which they are set, in which any suburban villa could conceal a scandalous secret brought back from India, Australia or America. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes is a far more interesting and drily witty person than any BBC scriptwriter could ever be or imagine. Too many of Doyle’s works – Brigadier Gerard, Professor Challenger and the great historical novels, not to mention his marvellous short stories – have already been wrongly forgotten. We mustn’t let this happen to Sherlock as well. And then, if you actually make any money, give it all to charities which help the maimed and bereaved people of Iraq, and the maimed British soldiers and bereaved military families whose grief and loss you caused by your vanity and your inability to stand up to the White House. And then just please go away, where we’ll never have to look at your silly face, or hear your silly voice, ever again. In return, we’ll all pretend that you wrote the book yourself.
14 August 2010 6:14 PM
Mr Cameron may need sharp elbows but the real middle classes never did
Holmes and the vanishing genius
The final chapter in Tony’s silly story?
Here’s an idea for Anthony Blair, whose vanity-packed memoirs will begin to fall like lumps of lead from the presses all too soon. Don’t bother having any signing sessions, not least because the country can’t afford the police presence. Just sit in a warehouse on some industrial estate and sign almost all the books. Then charge extra for the rare unsigned copies. People will give a lot more for an object they can be sure that you haven’t actually touched. They could even be offered as prizes.
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In the week that several British bodies were penalised by the EU for failing to display its nasty blue and yellow symbol, the EU appointed its first ambassador to the USA – who announced that he would henceforth be speaking on behalf of Britain and all other EU countries. How long before our majestic Washington embassy, which already flies the EU flag, is downgraded into a consulate? How long before our politicians, especially the useless ‘Eurosceptics’, admit that Brussels has succeeded where Philip of Spain, Bonaparte, the Kaiser and Hitler failed, and we are now a subject province of a continental empire?
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British ‘statesmen’ who imagine that their fearsome condemnations of Iran, or clarion calls for Turkish EU membership, resound in the chancelleries of the world, and are spoken of with awe in the cafes and teahouses of great cities, might like to know that while travelling recently in a European country, I was unable to change Sterling into local money. ‘Sorry. It’s an exotic currency,’ said the bank brusquely, as if I’d offered them a bundle of North Korean Won.
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Here they come again, the weird obsessives who want the clocks to be wrong all the year round. Look, if you want the children to come to school an hour earlier, just open the school an hour earlier and end classes an hour earlier. Then change back in the spring. You don’t need to make everyone else follow suit. Moving the clocks doesn’t alter the amount of daylight available.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
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