At the beginning of Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s new addition to Brideshead-genre stately worship, the outcast status of a non-posh Oxford student is instantly signalled by, to add to his low stature, his friendship with a mathematical genius with no social skills. Bespectacled, naturally.
In a film so thoroughly captivated by its upper-class inventory, inert and otherwise, it makes perfect sense that this outcast would rather be condescended to by the pretty college patrician and his vacuous circle. So it’s goodbye geek, hello Saltburn’s disapproving butler, complex place settings and non-mathematician style gems like “I can wear my suit of armour, Elsbeth”.
If it’s not unfair to the Beano (Lord Snooty’s pals arguably undertook more nuanced journeys), Fennell’s character development seemed to me cartoonish until I watched Sir Patrick Vallance at the Covid inquiry. I now appreciate that Saltburn’s preference for vain, ruling-class airheads over mathematically gifted nonentities is, however unappealing, a brilliant commentary on recent English politics.
Much of Vallance’s testimony confirmed other accounts of the chaos, brutishness and delay in Johnson’s No 10 while scientists were warning that catastrophe was possible, then imminent. Newly astonishing, however, are Vallance’s disclosures, recorded in his contemporaneous notes, about a “bamboozled” Boris Johnson’s numerical uselessness. Had he not, thank God, lied his way out of the job, we would still have a prime minister who cannot understand a graph, if at all, for longer than a few hours. Throughout the pandemic, our lives were in the hands of someone who could not, though priding himself on his leadership, follow basic maths, who preferred showing off, who had only prospered thanks to a political system where old habits of Eton- and Oxford-instilled entitlement – see also David Cameron’s return – uniquely accommodate such limitations. Neither politician could ever do much more than act confident and make mediocre speeches. Their fellow Etonians Kwasi Kwarteng and Jacob Rees-Mogg managed only the first.
It’s only fair, however, to mention that Cameron has, in addition to his work for Lex Greensill, successfully monetised himself – a business believed to be based on an episode in Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg. “I do not wish to be taking a liberty, sir,” Jeeves says to Bertram, proposing the sale of handshakes with a little-used aristocrat for $2 a time, “but I think that we have overlooked His Grace’s potentialities as a source of revenue.”
We knew, of course, that Johnson’s supporters had overlooked, in their enthusiasm for his faux-Woosterish affectations, narrow questions of probity and ability. Simon Kuper further explored in Chums, his fascinating account of Oxford ascendancy in UK politics, the large gap between Johnson’s capabilities and vital Brexit organisation: “Johnson’s high verbal intelligence had absolved him from ever developing his analytical intelligence. Concentrated thought could always be sidestepped with a joke.” Even in 2020, when people were dying.
As with any groundbreaking production, the inquiry has received some bad reviews, most of the stinkers appearing, so far, in places that once promoted Johnson and still see Cameron as something other than a tasteless joke. The proceedings are too slow, apparently, too personal, too costly and, for one Saltburn-minded critic, far too captured by the “spectrummy” mathematical types she blames for lockdown. The inquiry is in other words exposing, to the understandable distress of some Conservatives, what happens when their party, then the country, again falls in with an unqualified candidate’s unshakeable conviction that he was born to rule over it. This perverseness, when there are competent alternatives, has yet to be satisfactorily explained.
Maybe whatever irrepressible infatuation draws audiences to study pre-meritocratic arrangements in Saltburn, Downton, Brideshead and other tributes to feudal life also softens voters up for the patronage of a Cameron or a Johnson: fellow caricatures from an equally fantastic world. Earlier at the inquiry, Cameron announced, as if his recent failures had never happened, that the country is safest “when the prime minister is in the chair… making sure decisions are made”.
Thanks to the inquiry interrogations, we now know how this sometimes looks. “Watching PM get his head round stats is awful,” Vallance recorded. “He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.” Johnson couldn’t understand graphs: “Which one is the dark red one?” Or key concepts: “PM struggled with whole concept of doubling [times] … just couldn’t get it.” Even if Johnson appeared to comprehend, he would forget, or propose some ludicrous interpretation. For instance, of a graph: “Is the whole thing a mirage?” “Is it because of the great libertarian nation we are that it spreads so much”; “Maybe we are licked as a species.”
To the difficulties in scientific understanding that Vallance (in a phrase it is hard not to hear spoken in the voice of Martin Jarvis’s Jeeves) says are “not unusual amongst leaders in western democracies”, Johnson reportedly added something hopefully rarer: a near psychopathic-sounding heartlessness. He once remarked that Libya would be a great tourist destination when “the dead bodies were cleared away”; a pandemic was no reason for restraint. Old people had “had a good innings”, etc. For the bereaved and still sick, the disclosures must be near unendurable.
Although disregard for others’ survival certainly had its non-Eton/Oxford proponents, Johnson’s indifference and Cameron’s bland defences of austerity both add to the case, another byproduct of the inquiry, for protecting the public from, as well future epidemics, future outbreaks of public school syndrome. Possibly, to be on the safe side, by never appointing people from the great public schools. The pandemic’s lead Wykehamist, Rishi Sunak, has also been described, although he has yet to appear before the inquiry, as “pro-death”.
The more excruciating the revelations about Johnson’s pandemic leadership, the more mystifying it becomes that no senior scientist, as time passed, blew the whistle. Then again, as with Saltburn, maybe nobody would have believed such behaviour to be possible?
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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