I don't generally take much interest in the Royal family's disfunctional lives, but this article got me riled.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,2058819,00.html
Common people
No one knows why Prince William and Kate Middleton have split up. But that hasn't stopped a frenzy of speculation, most of it focused on Kate's middle-class family - particularly her mother, a gum-chewing former flight attendant. John Harris on what the weekend's events tell us about the class minefield that is Britain today
Tuesday April 17, 2007
The Guardian
She is, the newspapers claim, "pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle class". At Prince William's Sandhurst passing-out parade, she chewed gum. When she first met the Queen, according to unnamed sources sharing their prejudices with the press, she disastrously uttered the greeting "Pleased to meet you" instead of "Hello, Ma'am". Worse still, her vocabulary is alleged to include the dread word "toilet", and if she hasn't quite heard what you have said, she will invite no end of derision by saying "Pardon". In that part of British society that will for ever be built around strange vowel sounds, shooting animals, green clothes and endless luxury, there was really no hope for her.
In the hurricane of speculation and gossip that has followed this year's Great Royal Break-Up, the voices quoted, keen to find a (preferably female) scapegoat, have returned again and again to Carole Middleton: mother of Kate, resident of Bucklebury in Berkshire, ex-flight attendant, and alleged "ferocious social climber". According to one "royal source" who spoke to the Mail on Sunday, "The Queen was fond of Kate and liked her father, but let's just say there was a feeling that Mrs Middleton was not right or acceptable." Yesterday's papers told stories of blue-blooded pals of the prince making references to Mrs Middleton's former career by wittily whispering "doors to manual" whenever her daughter was out of earshot.
Carole Middleton's supposed role in the Wills'n'Kate saga puts her somewhere between Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and the titular anti-heroine of Noël Coward's song Mrs Worthington. Leaving aside slightly fantastical reports about mother and daughter cooking up a marry-the-future-king plot while Kate was in her early teens, Mrs Middleton was apparently thrilled at the couple's initial courtship and anxious to do whatever she could to further its progress. She is said, by papers keen to portray her as the pushy mother, to have "urged her daughter to take riding lessons and advised her to keep her fashion style modest and far from edgy". She allegedly pushed Kate to take a relatively lowly job as a children's accessories buyer for the Jigsaw clothing chain, so as to allow her the flexibility that a royal paramour will always require. All the while, she saw to the running of Party Pieces, the self-styled "leading UK children's party supplier" - which once paid for Kate's school fees and seems to represent a quintessentially nouveau-riche dream somewhere between Thatcherite entrepreneurship and an episode of Relocation Relocation, proudly claiming to have its own call centre "in a 200-year-old barn".
And now? Her dreams are dust, proof that - as yet another "insider" put it - "There are some social mountains you just can't scale. You can't become royal through sheer force of will." The same "source" went on: "Carole's approach is very aspirational. But re-laying your drive and trimming the wisteria around your front door isn't going to make your home, or your daughter, fit for a prince."
Somewhere in all this, there lurks a very modern cautionary tale. The Daily Mail praises "middle-class values" as if they were the very acme of British achievement. The mission of New Labour, we were told at the last election, was "to allow more people to join the middle class". Tony Parsons, a paragon of the increasingly rare jump from proletariat to bourgeoisie, once saluted the latter as follows: "They are the most cultured class, [and] the hardest working. They believe in the welfare state but are aware of its corrupting nature ... There are many things to despise about the middle class, but unlike the nobs and the riff-raff, they do not know their place. They believe in self-improvement."
Work hard, invest wisely, and it could all be yours: weekly trips to Waitrose, sojourns in southern Europe, and a confident approach to the average wine list. Should you wish, you may even wish to firm up your children's life chances by sending them to an expensive school, where they may just be lucky enough mix with the sons and daughters of privilege. But here's the interesting thing: even if being middle class represents modern Britain's social ideal, at the upper end of the class system there still lies one of the most reinforced glass ceilings that humankind has ever managed to build. Here, those self-same middle-class values may well turn into a disadvantage, class will harden into caste - and, faced by a mass of subtle gradations and intricate etiquette, the social elevator will often grind to a halt. If the stories about Kate and Carole Middleton are true, then anyone who tries to move stands a very good chance of being kicked back down again. In France, of course, they thrashed a good deal of this out at the end of the 18th century; here, for better or worse, the tensions go on.
The alleged fate of the Middletons is not the only example. Of late, the clash between middle and upper classes has surely been played out whenever the Windsors have bumped up against the Blairs. Strip the plotline of the award-winning film The Queen down to its basics, and there it is: the Prime Minister's bourgeois touchy-feeliness colliding with a world that wants nothing to do with it. (In which sense, the fact that the film pits swinging London against stuffy old Balmoral is perfect). For a real-life crystallisation of the same story, think back to that footage of the Queen and Prince Philip refusing to cross their arms and join in Auld Lang Syne with nearly as much gusto as Cherie and Tony Blair.
When I speak to Peter York, the journalist, broadcaster and author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, he spends 20 minutes guiding me through the nuanced minefield that these days surrounds the distinction between middle and upper class, partly traceable to the fact that people from the latter "mix with other people far more than they used to - they go into occupations where being conspicuously toff is a disadvantage". He claims that the tell-tale words once grouped into the categories of "U" and "non-U" - by Nancy Mitford, whose 1956 essay Noblesse Oblige lurked in the background of the weekend's stories - are losing their charge, though that hardly heralds the arrival of any kind of classlessness.
"These things are not nearly as clear-cut as they used to be," he says. "And they're very much mediated by generation. If people's parents and grandparents are possible arbiters of whether someone gets married or not, they really care about these things, even if the young people themselves might not. But they've been absolutely drummed into people over 35: things like saying 'toilet', and saying 'pardon?' instead of 'what?'. To them, things like that are like chalk on a blackboard."
The younger upper-crust, he explains, are not quite as doctrinaire. Their vetting procedures are altogether more subtle, though that arguably makes them even more difficult to navigate. "To them, it's all about taste," he says. So it's all about shopping. "Clothes, housing, cars - there are all sorts of things that will have that blackboard- scraping quality." The adjective he uses here is "charlie" - as in "a proper charlie" - intended to denote anything seen as "naff, unsophisticated or low-rent".
"Imagine if both the Beckhams turned up, wanting one of their boys to marry into a smart family," he says. "On one hand, the people they were introducing themselves to would love their money, in the way that the upper class have always loved the money of American heiresses. But at the same time, the way they looked would just scrape: over-fashiony, overdone hair, over-made up ... just over, over, over."
When I mention the tales about Carole Middleton, there is a sharp intake of breath. "I'm a bit taken aback about the idea of chewing gum at a royal occasion, I have to say. If it's true, some sort of danger signal should have told her that wasn't a brilliant thing to do. Historically, chewing gum has great symbolism and baggage. It's lower-class teenage rebellion. It's sort of, 'Oo-er. She could be a loose cannon.'"
I also put in a call to Mary Killen, author of the Spectator's rib-tickling etiquette column (sample letter: "My new car is a Volkswagen golf. I understand that there is a class shibboleth about the pronunciation of the word 'golf', and that, as far as the game is concerned, it is considered infra dig (ie, beneath one's dignity) to pronounce the 'l'. Does the same apply to a vehicle?"). As well as dispensing weekly advice to those would-be Middletons anxious about how to behave in rarefied places, Killen lives close to the upscale Wiltshire town of Marlborough, where Kate Middleton went to school.
She begins by giving me a quick guide to the current state of aristocratic manners. "I know that quite a few upper-class people say 'toilet' now, but as a joke," she says. "And did you know that the word 'meal' is meant to be very common? You should always say 'lunch', 'dinner' or 'breakfast'. And there are very small, subtle distinguishing factors, like never reading a novel in a drawing room. If you read a coffee-table book, that's fine, because everyone knows it's a short-attention-span thing. But a novel makes you unavailable." She goes on: "I know people who think tomatoes are common; they won't have a tomato in the house. Another indicator is marmalade. Thin, runny, hand-made marmalade is a sign of being upper class, whereas firm, gelatinous marmalade is common. Why? It's just one of those things. Upper-class people make their own marmalade, and they tend to prefer it runny, probably because they've got lots of people to clear up the mess."
When it comes to the stories about Carole Middleton's alleged failure to gel with the Windsors, she says she is sceptical. "At least two of the Middleton children went to Marlborough, so I think she'd have picked up the fact that you don't say 'pardon' and 'toilet'. And apart from anything else, I'd have actually thought that the royals would have liked to marry down."
Then she throws me something of a curve. "They're the most un-snobbish of anyone in the country, the royals," she claims. "Unlike the old French nobility, they think that invigorating blood is necessary. I think they'd have probably welcomed some hard-working stock."
To be fair, those who would have you believe that the House of Windsor does occasionally welcome self-made upstarts into its gene pool have one recent example on their side: Sophie Rhys-Jones, now known as the Countess of Wessex, whose father Christopher was a tyre salesman. That said, when it comes to the next king, some of the more speculative responses to the Wills'n'Kate break-up have suggested that the royals will always tend to put genetic imperatives behind mixing with the right sort of people. Yesterday, for example, the Daily Mail claimed that, socially speaking, Prince William had already started to look back up, "dallying with two society beauties as Kate Middleton battled to save their four-year romance". Accompanying the story was a picture of the ex-queen-to-be, demonstrating her return to earth by carrying a box marked "Spar onion rings".
Meanwhile, those poor souls who earn a living from forecasting the path of royal romances began looking at Prince William's possible future girlfriends. They included Rosie Ruck-Keene ("The pair danced at Mihiki, but were with her boyfriend, William van Cutsem"), a "popular member of William's polo set" called Davina Duckworth-Chad, and Lady Rosanagh Innes-Ker, the daughter of the Duke of Roxburghe.
In the Sun, by far the biggest coverage was given to one Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, who the coverage reckoned was "no shrinking violet". "She was the first cover girl of posh Country Life magazine to appear with a belly-button ring," it said. "A party girl, Isabella is often spotted at Boujis nightclub in London's swanky South Kensington, a favourite with the prince and his pals."
Normal royal service, it seemed, had been resumed.