The English may be suspicious of foreigners but we sometimes need them to explain us to ourselves. Detlev Piltz, a German lawyer, became an anglophile as a 16-year-old schoolboy when he spent a month in the home of a Cotswold vicar, whose infant daughter Theresa would grow up to become prime minister. The English, he thinks, are a “wondrously wacky people”. And what especially fascinates him is our class system, the nuances of which he has been studying for half a century.
He thinks it’s the elephant in our room, something we don’t talk about, or which we pretend doesn’t exist. For a politician to admit to having a privileged background is “political suicide”; even Labour, once the party of the proletariat, finds class an uncomfortable subject. MPs may talk of levelled up, one-nation togetherness but they know it’s unattainable. “Class is the enemy of equality,” Piltz says, but that’s no reason to knock it. To his mind, England isn’t class-ridden but class-enriched.
