Ysenda Maxtone Graham has narrated this article for you to listen to.
No one likes a blatant boaster. So, as adults, we learn that if we want to boast, we must be subtle about it. The way to show off without being loathed is to drop small details about your life into your conversation and your prose, to signal your taste, education, career achievements and social status.
Doing this is tricky enough for right-wing people, who need to come up with subtle ways of letting others know, for example, that they can afford private school fees, went to Oxbridge, shop at Waitrose, own at least one home and go on holiday in Provence or Tuscany. Words and phrases such as ‘exeat’, ‘scraped through my Prelims’, ‘perfectly ripe avocados’, ‘basement kitchen’ and ‘bumping up through the olive grove’ do the work.
For left-wing people, or ‘left-liberals’, as middle-class left-wing people now style themselves, boasting is even harder. Not only are they constrained by the ‘you mustn’t boast’ stricture; they have the added constraint that they must try not to show off about the slightest wealth or privilege.
You’d think, in that case, that left-liberals wouldn’t boast at all. But this is not the case. The urge to boast is hard-wired into the human psyche from childhood onwards.
It’s fine, if you’re a left-liberal, to show off about your intellectual wealth. You can boast about your deep knowledge of French poetry (‘où sont les neiges d’antan?’), your love of Beckett and Blake, and that you subscribe to the LRB (no need to spell out its full name). You can also quietly boast about your good character. You can advertise the fact that you’re good at cooking and good in bed; that your divorce was amicable; that you’re on excellent terms with your highly intelligent offspring and all your exes; and that you’re generous to beggars, and adored by cats and pub landladies.
It’s intriguing to see what left-liberals do boast about. In a recent New Statesman piece on the poor quality of street food served to tourists in the West End, Finn McRedmond slipped this in: ‘No one serves rubbish to the people they love. The family labradoodle, for example, gets a little cube of the good pecorino every time someone passes the fridge.’
The subtlety here is that the boast displays two levels of good taste: first, that McRedmond doesn’t go for the obvious Italian cheese (parmesan) and secondly that she knows her ‘good’ pecorino from the kind that the benighted middle classes buy in packets from Waitrose. The downside of the boast is that she’s admitted she can afford expensive cheese. And a Bulgarian rescue mongrel would surely have reflected better on her than a labradoodle.
Right-leaning people, who believe in the right to be rich, can dare to drop in the fact that they go skiing – as long as they add a touch of self-deprecation to puncture the boast. In her recent Spectator column on being late for Jilly Cooper’s memorial service, Rachel Johnson mentioned being so chronically unpunctual that she nearly missed the flight to her heli-skiing holiday. And it’s fine for a right-leaning person to mention owning a second home, in Gloucestershire, or the Cotswolds, or wherever you like – again, as long as you soften the boast with a few details, such as that your children are bored stiff when forced to go there at weekends, or that the gridlock on the M4 on Sunday evening is a nightmare.
She knows her ‘good’ pecorino from the kind that the benighted middle classes buy in packets from Waitrose
The second home is much more dangerous for left-liberals, and is only mentionable if it’s a cottage, ‘within our budget’, and situated in a literary or bohemian area such as Aldeburgh or Hay-on-Wye. Rainwater must be collected in the water butt; a lot of composting and recycling must go on; the word ‘ramshackle’ must be used; and you must make it clear that you take a keen interest in local political concerns. If the cottage is by the sea, you need to mention you swim in it all year round and have fish and chips out of newspaper afterwards. It’s also acceptable to mention your new home in north Norfolk if you focus on the bookshelves you’re erecting there for your vast book collection, as Lucy Mangan did in the Guardian.
When it comes to education, if you’re right-wing, two possible boasts are: 1. that you went to a private school (and are therefore very well-educated); and 2. that you’re struggling to pay the fees for your children (you’re an admirably self-sacrificing parent). Both of those are off-limits for left-liberals. The best boast for them is that they went to an ordinary comprehensive (and look how successful they’ve been in spite of or because of it). In fact, this boast is so irresistible and easy that it’s worth betting that any left-liberal columnist who doesn’t ever mention his own education was educated privately.
As for boasting about one’s ancestors, you can see the relief, as well as the pity, on the faces of today’s celebrities when they discover on Who Do You Think You Are? that their great-great-great-grandmother was in a workhouse or a debtors’ prison. What would have been a never-mentioned source of shame 100 years ago is now boast material. Polly Toynbee admits in her 2023 memoir My Family and Other Radicals: ‘The liberal and left-wing middle classes writhe in the particular contortions of their own moral inadequacy… To live on the left side is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions forever destined to fall short of ideals.’ Being descended from the upper classes, she tells us that she ‘hunted hard for a redeeming twig of a working-class branch of my family tree, without success’.
It’s becoming harder to pull off a boast that raises you in the estimation of everyone on the left. Arwa Mahdawi wrote in the Guardian in January that her father had had Greta Thunberg to stay before Christmas, while Thunberg was visiting London to support hunger strikers affiliated with Palestine Action. Mahdawi’s stock might have increased in Hampstead as a result, but perhaps not in Hartlepool.
Comments