Picture this. It was just after 12.00 noon on Wednesday 24 February, I was sitting in my car by the wonderful Book Barn at Hallatrow, enjoying the late winter sunshine, eating my lunch, listening to Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on BBC Radio Five Live.
Wherever I am, I usually try to listen. I don’t know why. Hundreds of, mainly, men who misrepresent the great British public have their 30 minutes of infamy. Yesterday, things were proceeding as usual. The leaden tongued leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn was asking David Cameron some worthy questions about the NHS when Angela Eagle heckled the PM about his own mother who opposed welfare cuts. Then, it happened. Cameron lost it like never before. Obviously, I could not actually see what happened but it was easy to visualise. He said this:
“I know what my mother would say. She’d look across the dispatch box and say: put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.” If you think that reads badly, then you should have heard it. It was jaw-dropping, one of those, “Did he really say that?” moments. It quickly dawned on me that Cameron really had said it.
John Crace’s sketch in today’s Guardian does Cameron’s comments far better justice than I ever could. “Here was Dave unscripted,” wrote Crace, “the Dave that Dave would rather you didn’t see. This wasn’t about his mother, it was about him. His values; the Dave of pomp, circumstance and entitlement.” I do urge you to seek it out and read it.
I doubt whether much of the PMQs exchange will feature heavily in today’s newspapers because the last thing the proprietors will want their readers to realise that Cameron is not actually the man of the people he has pretended for all this years to be. It must have been an amazing effort to wear the mask of posh boy who understands how mere plebs live their lives. That is not to say that privileged people like Cameron cannot, by the very nature of their upbringing, even imagine what it’s like to not have much money, but plainly he has absolutely no idea.
I am certainly not interested in whether Jeremy Corbyn wears a smart Armani suit, does his tie up according to posh people’s regulations and doesn’t sing the national anthem but then I am not exactly noted for my stylish dress sense, I still do not understand the point of wearing ties in the first place (“they look smart” does cut it for me: what are they for?) and God Save The Queen is a truly terrible, uninspiring national anthem. I can think of plenty of reasons why Corbyn is a crap leader of the Labour Party and useless leader of the opposition, but his dress sense and choice of songs to sing are not among them. But they matter to Cameron.
Visit the streets of Bristol and any other big city and you will see plenty of people sitting on blankets, begging for money, their frayed old trousers held up by string. They do not have access to the expensive clothing – most of them cannot afford to buy clothing at all – although I suppose they could consider singing the national anthem in order to stop freezing to death.
Perhaps Cameron’s comments were deliberately outrageous in order to bury some bad news elsewhere, like the constant rows over Europe in the Tory Party, but maybe, just maybe, the mask slipped, the illusion that Dave was everyman; the man who loved football (even if he couldn’t always remember which team he supported), he took his children to the pub (and left them there) and enjoyed fish and chips from his local chippy every Friday evening before settling down to Eastenders.
Like Michael Foot before him, the establishment, this time in the form of the prime minister, have effectively launched a form of class war. God alone knows what Cameron would make of me, going to work in a faded pair of Levis, a T shirt that cost less than £4 in Sainsburys and a pair of Tesco trainers. Doubtless, he’d bawl me out in public, ridiculing my dress sense. And what would his mother say? She would probably suggest that I should have chosen my birth mother better and gone to Eton.
Very ugly, Mr Cameron, but not beneath you because this is what you are really like. 36.9% of those who voted in last year’s election obviously didn’t see your sheer snobbery as an obstacle to leading the country. But all this so-called Tory modernisation didn’t have much effect, did it, least of all with you?
