As an actual common person (regional, never miss an episode of The Chase, find the taste of cheese from a tube unapologetically delicious), the annual publication of Nicky Haslam’s Common List has turned into something of a high point of the festive calendar. Mr Haslam, an 85-year-old interior designer with a Chelsea practice who is friends with the actual Queen, is one of those posh people common people quite like. If you venture three lines down his Instagram page, you’ll find a picture of him clinking champagne flutes with David Cameron while wearing a hoodie and white jeans. Despite the connections, he’s funny, hard, unceremonious.
Nicky Haslam is one of those stately homos who embodies the acidic end of what happens to gay men when we reach our dotage, in all its gloriously vile specifics. Men of his age earned their withering judgements. If you want to know how and why, I’d heartily recommend Peter Parker’s Some Men of London compendium of writings about homosexuality between the end of World War II and legalisation beginning in 1967. Volume 2 has just been published. It makes for riveting, startling, often horrifyingly comprehensive reading.
Thus, men of Haslam’s ilk find just about everything around them ghastly. His particular bug-bears, as numbered on his annual Common List, are plucked from a mid-to-upper class taste tier which fancies itself sophisticated and meaningful for no reason. In 2018, he hit the ‘publish and be damned’ button, upsetting the double-barrelled classes by suggesting that some of the things they hold dear might, in fact, be dreadful. Each year since, Haslam’s ridiculous list of petty snobberies have become more and more absorbing.
Past inclusions on The Common List have numbered skiing in France, Richard Branson, Puglia, James Bond and (my favourite) most young Royals. This year’s feature podcasts, Anthony Gormley sculptures, The Welsh Guards, Clarice Cliff china, and St Paul’s school. The latter made me laugh aloud, if only because that was my own alma mater. Yet even commoners like me could glean from Haslam’s waspish campery that he wasn’t referring to the clapped out comprehensive in South Manchester. From the cheap seats, Haslam’s list has always looked borderline certifiable, if hilarious, like catching some dusty old Dame in the garden of Sandringham openly shuddering at her host’s pocket square.
When I first met actual posh people at University, I might’ve envied their money, but I didn’t envy their lives
The point of Haslam’s Common List is to poke a stick at his own people, to chuck a grenade at the latent stupidity and shallowness of the British upper classes, to prick that specific nerve of theirs that cares deeply about what other people think. It only works because it comes from the inside. Common people couldn’t care less.
Contrary to the Saltburn school of thinking, when I first met actual posh people at University, I might’ve envied their money, but I didn’t envy their lives. Like all common people, I thought they all seemed slightly mad, in that they couldn’t hold a proper conversation with anyone outside of their immediate peer group, had idiotic names, didn’t let their children live at home for most of the year and could make neither head nor tail of how to behave in nightclubs. Then slightly sad, in that they had nothing tangible to aspire to. Finding out that a significant number of posh people’s kids were on drugs at a precociously young age had a peculiar logic to it, bereft as they were of the innocent human highs of actual achievement, self-improvement or doing things for themselves. The concept of being lonely at the top had been fleshed out in two terms flat.
In my more maudlin hours, I have even been known to feel a little sorry for them. It is with this in mind that, with unusual Christmas cheer, I’ve become unnecessarily concerned for Nicky Haslam. If he’s to continue publishing his industrious, arbitrary taste foibles, he’s going to need to address a key twist they’ve taken for 2024. I won’t lie, I came over a little Common List myself when, this weekend I stumbled across a market stall selling the Common List stitched into tea towels in the department stores accessories wing. Common people adore Selfridges, particularly since it franchised to the provinces.
I hate to say this, and am fully aware that there are more pressing concerns for the state of the world as we hurtle toward a new year, but is Nicky Haslam himself, unappointed taste monitor of the upper classes, turning a bit common? What, indeed, could be more lowbrow than flogging comedy tea-towel merch for fifty quid a pop on Oxford Street?
The stand is guarded by (gulp) mirror-balls. If Nicky Haslam’s Common List starts to take on the art direction of Sophie Ellis Bextor’s kitchen discos, what hope is there left for the one residual old queen left to poke an affectionate stick at the toffs? Has the Common List all been in vain? Is the last standing satirist of a dying British breed leaving behind a parting legacy of inventing the “Live Laugh Love” for Holland Park? Have a quiet word with yourself next year, Haslam. These people need you.
Paul Flynn is a columnist for The Standard
