The biggest rebel in my year at school (a pretty raggedy state comprehensive near Chester) was a guy called Paul. He had very long hair, wore a trench coat and was regularly told to ‘have a bath’ by the more boorish elements of the playground. Paul railed against the system in the way that only teenagers who have experienced nothing of life but have read at least half of The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsider can. The more militaristic tranche of our teachers also hated him for the permanent odour of weed that followed him around and the crude drawing of Che Guevara on his rucksack. He was one of my best friends.
Paul cut his hair and stopped reading Noam Chomsky in his mid-twenties. But he retained his beliefs, quietly obtaining employment in the civil service, working in the field of marine life protection. To me, his journey is a textbook example of how teenage heterodoxy can evolve into something meaningful at a pretty young age.
I hold no such hopes of maturation when it comes to Arthur Clifton, the figurehead of the nauseating Take Back Power group. Last week, the group of ‘protestors’ announced that after dumping manure inside the Ritz Hotel and throwing custard at a case containing the state crown at the Tower of London (both locations they no doubt have first-hand experience of from numerous childhood visits with their ever-indulging parents), they are soon to embark upon a mass shoplifting raid on Waitrose. The plan for the looted sourdough and mangetout, according to Clifton, is to then ‘redistribute it to the local community’.
You might assume that these stunts have come from the mind of a 12-year-old who has recently been a bit upset over reading about the death of Boxer for the first time in Animal Farm. But no – Arthur is 25.
Now the inevitable bit of the story. The father of dear Arthur is a boss at international insurance firm Chaucer Group. His darling progeny was privately educated and raised in upmarket Chiswick, so perhaps his revolutionary credentials began by him being on cordial terms with Daddy’s gardener. It’s probably where he got the idea for the manure stunt from.
This is just all too easy, isn’t it? Children of the privileged have long been susceptible to radicalism, from Patty Hearst to most of the Redgraves. But Artykins and his thankfully still small cohort of suburban subversives exude a new depth of asininity.
Yes, I could talk about Waitrose being an employee-owned company. I could question the gratitude ‘disadvantaged’ people may display when given a bottle of pilfered first press olive oil and shop-soiled pecorino from a former independent schoolboy when what they really need to do is pay the gas bill. I could rail against Arthur’s comparison between himself and the suffragettes; before pondering why we’ve all seemingly missed his decades of patient lobbying and civic responsibility a la Millicent Fawcett.
Children of the privileged have long been susceptible to radicalism, but these suburban subversives exude a new depth of asininity
Arthur is leading a campaign that makes Just Stop Oil look like the Chartists in terms of intellectual heft. He’s also walking, breathing evidence for any argument about the downfall of private education; this is a man quoted as saying: ‘Less and less people can afford less and less food.’ The sooner he can add ‘fewer’ to his vocabulary the better.
But none of this hits the nub. The most vital point among the many that Arthur has failed to understand (and it’s a long list indeed) is that you can’t succeed as the self-appointed figurehead of a revolution when the people you are supposed to be liberating absolutely despise you. If Arthur went anywhere near my old school playground, the canteen of the shampoo factory I worked in or even the bar counter I poured pints behind in Middlesbrough, he would last around five minutes among men and women who are supple, headstrong, determined, principled, sure-minded, clear-headed, obdurate and proud.
All this embarrassment about stealing charcuterie and Muscadet from Waitrose in the coming months can be resolved easily enough. All Artykins needs to do is ask Mater and Pater for £500. Then he should walk from Chiswick to an estate in Hammersmith, ignoring Mummy’s pleas to ‘be careful around those rough boys’. There he should stop the first single mother he can find and give her the entire wad of cash to do whatever the hell she likes with. Failing that, he could wait outside an NHS intensive care unit and give the bundle of notes to any Band Five nurse or healthcare assistant coming off a 13-hour night shift.
It’s incredibly easy, doesn’t involve the purchase of custard or animal excrement and, who knows, it may be the first time he’s ever had contact with a genuine working person. They’ll still hate you, of course. But at least now you don’t have to pester your gardener for more manure.
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