A lot of the opening moves in the culture war were predicated on the idea that normal people hate Londoners. There were suddenly so many new words for us, all of them pejorative, often for puzzling reasons you could only really understand with your gut: “metropolitan elites”; “experts”; “cappuccino-drinkers” which later became “latte-sippers”; “north London lawyers”, in which the city itself had helpfully been rolled into the insult; “Westminster bubble”, which pretended to slate politicians but atmospherically tainted anyone at all proximal to Westminster.
The capital was a byword for inauthenticity, a natural habitat for the wealthy and the remote. It couldn’t possibly stick, I thought, because it is so dumb. Plenty of Londoners aren’t wealthy at all. Plenty of people right across the country – yes, even in the north of England – put milk in their coffee.
