Following a post on social media about letting her 15-year-old son go on an Interrailing trip, Kirstie Allsopp should definitely be investigated by somebody; if there were a tribunal court for crimes of deliberate, nay, provocative smugness, that would be ideal. Instead, social services have got involved. They haven’t told Allsopp who made the referral, only that there were safeguarding issues, related to having a 15-year-old and not always being crystal clear on his location, location, location.
“I just felt sick,” Allsopp told the Mail on Sunday, “absolutely sick. Then I was cross. I was very, very cross. It was just so extraordinary. I was in a parallel universe where they were actually taking this seriously. I have broken no law, and nothing about allowing my child to travel around Europe is neglectful.”
The case looks pretty open and shut to me: Allsopp can’t have thought she was being neglectful, or she wouldn’t have been showing off about the decision. So, if intention counts for anything in the demonstration of child neglect, she is innocent.
Of course, I’m not a safeguarding expert. Besides, we are in a world beyond guilt and innocence, because Allsopp is – well, posh is a freighted word, so let’s go with “plentifully endowed with social capital”. You can get away with murder, childcare-wise, when you are posh. Almost everything, from travelling alone, to getting stung by a wasp, gets filed under “character-building”.
It starts when they are babies. Forgot their socks? Didn’t feed them lunch? You are building a leadership class for the next generation. The middle classes police each other, and everyone else, around barely perceptible risk – IQ damage from not enough breastfeeding, attachment problems from too much screen time – in a frantic but unwinnable race to remove all peril from the human experience. But a whole upper echelon is allowed to cycle alone from the age of five, hand-rear their own bull mastiffs from 10, and experiment with LSD at 12 as a rite of passage into adolescence. What doesn’t kill you makes you posher.
It is probably not as bad as it once was. Orwell described his prep school, St Cyprian’s in Sussex, as having the motto: “It is healthy to get up from a meal feeling as hungry as when you sat down.” I went back to look that up, thinking it a droll little snapshot of hardship as a badge of breeding, and the opening paragraph was such a devastating account of public school trauma that all the drollery drained away. Nevertheless, it is a genuine peculiarity of the poshos of yesteryear. You would think that was the most profound human leveller, the true universal that connected all of us across every culture, class and experience: none of us can stand for one second our children going hungry. We can’t even bear to imagine it. Everyone, that is, apart from one small cadre of British society, who once built entire institutions just to ensure that their children were hungry most of the time.
Of course, those days have passed, and most things public schools used to be famous for are no longer de rigueur. The question to which Eton was the answer – how do we create a class that doesn’t mind always being hungry and never being warm enough, in case we want to have multiple wars, one after another? – is no longer front-of-mind. But humans being what they are, there are definitely, positively still grandparents, and therefore parents, out in the wild, who think it is healthy to get up from a meal as hungry as when you sat down.
Sorry, quick recap: I have no doubt that Allsopp’s son has been consistently well fed, has never taken LSD and is perfectly happy Interrailing, and I share her view that, whatever your 15-year-old wants, it is probably fine, as long as it involves trains. My ideal world is one in which we all police each other a lot less, domestically, across every class. But given this is the world we are in, I merely note the double standard from the sidelines.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
