Psychologically speaking, I feel I understood the last two prime ministers only as they were leaving us. With Liz Truss this might seem understandable, given she was in office for 10 minutes. Then again she had been around for years – yet it was only watching her final days, and then reading one illuminating political obituary, that I felt I got it. “I met Truss at university,” wrote Tanya Gold in Politico, “long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart.”
Ah, I see, I suddenly thought. Why had I not got it before? My surmises felt further confirmed reading Rory Stewart’s political memoir, when Truss asks how his weekend has been. “I explained that my father had died,” Stewart writes. “She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when the 25-year environment plan would be ready.” Was Truss being deliberately heartless? Or did she, in the moment, forget the learned thing to do in the situation, which didn’t come to her reflexively, as it might to most? Perhaps the same thing happened when she beat Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership contest and didn’t shake his hand.
But on to Sunak himself, who seems likely to be taking his political leave of us fairly soon. Ineptly telling ITV that he “went without” a Sky subscription as a teenager has drawn howls from all quarters this week, as people pointed to what we might call his lack of a political Sky dish, and the fact the PM had an extraordinarily privileged education. Everyone knows this is not suffering – Sunak knows this is not suffering – so why did he say it? Even his gaffes feel inauthentic.
Yet something makes him tick. I didn’t meet Sunak at school but I went to a school like his, in a similar era, and I suddenly realised I’d believe him if he said: “I didn’t go without anything, and I was in the most privileged educational system, but I probably had the least money and the least social cachet within that system. I know I became head boy in the end, but the muscle memory of having not been the same to start with remains.” He couldn’t say that, of course, because no politicians can say things like that. But I think it underpins him, even if it doesn’t qualify as a defining “struggle”. Let’s get our “only one pair of diamond shoes” jokes out now.
However. The perfectly well-to-do young man swept up in longing for the world of the infinitely better-to-do is very much A Thing, or we wouldn’t be so endlessly fascinated by his fictional avatar. Ripley, Brideshead, Saltburn, Gatsby, a very good and funny recent novel I just read called The Kellerby Code: fiction is full of people who find themselves excruciated by their own gaucheness, simply because they befriend or love those of supposedly more rarefied social standing than themselves. Those they befriend, incidentally, are almost always dreadful people. More than that, their gilded, class-based insouciance is often explicitly corrupting. Trying to be like them – an essentially doomed enterprise – can make people do both silly and monstrous things. Those who try are consumed by a mania for burying the past, and “passing” as born to the same life.
The reader experiences their every faux pas vicariously. This week I saw a picture of an early-teen Sunak in a shiny leather jacket and knew instinctively he’d have been sniggered at had he turned up with it to school. New cars would have been common; old cars held together with mud and dog hair would have been smart – all those arcane codes. Can the keen student learn them somewhere?
Sunak devoured Jilly Cooper books, with their dazzling county families who don’t give a toss about anything, and their jolly self-made friends who consequently don’t either. Much of the comedy comes from the middle classes caring very much about everything. They are condemned, sitcom style, to always get it wrong. I fear none of them has Sky.
Writing about the sledgehammer glamour of Judith Krantz’s bonkbuster novels, Clive James twinkled: “Mrs Krantz would probably hate to hear it said, but she gives the impression of having been included late amongst the exclusiveness she so admires. There is nothing wrong with gusto, but when easy familiarity is what you are trying to convey, gush is to be avoided.” This is a version of what I see when I watch that painful video of a young Sunak trying to butch out being a toff. “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class,” he tries to breeze, before affecting to catch himself at the absurdity by adding: “Well, not working class!” Far from being convincingly grand, he’s a man not really pulling off the act.
Questioned about that clip during the first Tory leadership contest of 2022, Sunak still wasn’t at ease enough with himself to laugh, “What an idiot!”, instead looking exposed and saying primly: “We all say silly things when we are students.” Some keep at it. There is probably no more concise dismissal of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s decades-long attempt to play a character than one by Matthew Parris, who once explained in parenthesis that “the seriously grand don’t dress up, don’t stand on ceremony and don’t hyphenate; the Rees-Moggs are just rich people from Somerset whose boy never outgrew a silly phase at Oxford”. In fact, it predates that. At Eton, Jacob was regarded as a joke, in large part for his obviously adopted airs, which hung on him then as ill-fittingly as his silly suits do now.
The irony for Rishi Sunak is that he now “passes” to most voters as someone definitely posh – even though the truth is more shaded. What a deadening, suppressive, exhausting thing the British class system can be, even when you end up richer than the king. Funnily enough, I was told while in the US last week that Sunak had already enrolled his daughters at an LA private school. It can’t be the case, of course, as he has said he is staying here whatever happens in the election. But you can see why he married someone he met in California, and you can quite see he might yearn for the release of the US, where none of it matters. They don’t even HAVE a class system over there, the British upper classes will occasionally claim – disapprovingly, of course.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
