In 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-fashioning. The editor said no – we had to draw a line somewhere. I deferred, which was annoying, because I was completely right; everything that’s wrong with that film was visible from space.
And yet, give it its due, it caught the spirit of the age. It has nauseating class politics: the central love affair, between Hugh Grant’s prime minister and Martine McCutcheon’s tea lady, is a fairytale precisely because its emotional centre is lottery-winner gratitude, that a prince might fall for a peasant. And this, looking back, was merely the benevolent, festive face of a derision for the working class that, some years later, my colleague Owen Jones would describe in Chavs.
