We don’t know for sure who spoke this ancestral tongue (which linguists call Proto-Indo-European or PIE), but somehow they and their descendants spread it across a vast area — as a result of which most of the indigenous languages went extinct. The Basque language is one of the few surviving fragments of the linguistic diversity that must have once existed in Europe. So what happened? How did those PIE-speakers sweep all before them?
The most widely-held theory is that their original homeland was somewhere in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. These were people of the steppe and the secret of their success was that they domesticated the horse. As a result they acquired superpowers: the ability to travel across distances and strike with a force that other peoples couldn’t hope to match. In all likelihood , they became conquerors — and when one ruling class replaces another, the language often changes too.
The terrifying power of the mounted warrior may also be the origin of the centaur myth. To people who have never seen horses, or at least never learned to ride them, the sight of man and beast moving together as one suggests a monstrous hybrid of the two. In ancient Greek culture, the centaur was the personification of chaos — of the barbarian charging out of the wilderness.
Horsemanship doesn’t just confer speed and strength, but also height. It literally separates those on top from those below. Away from the battlefield, the man on a horse is a symbol of the class system. In this respect, the connection to hunting for sport is especially potent.
Once upon a time, we were all hunter-gatherers. But then came farming, which allowed our numbers to grow. Or maybe it was our growing numbers that required us to start farming. Either way, game became scarce and was monopolised by the ruling class. They ate meat; we ate grass. They remained hunters; we became poachers.
And this, I think, is our real problem with “country sports” and all the class associations that go with it. Contemporary concerns over animal welfare are a thin veneer over something much, much older — a cultural memory of subjugation. When the Countryside Alliance and other groups campaigned to save hunting, they implored the public to consider just how much hunting means to some rural communities. The reason why this failed is not because these practices have no meaning to the rest of the population, but because they still do.
The so-called “High Tories” really ought to understand this stuff. They’re the ones always going on about custom and tradition: the inherited intuitions that link the present to the past. And, they’re right — these things are real and they matter. But they matter to everyone — the descendants of downtrodden peasants, not just the men on horses.
Hunting is not the only signifier of poshness; schooling is a big part of it too. The exclusivity of an expensive private education obviously leaves the state educated majority on the outside, but that’s not all — there’s also the bit about people sending their children away. Hogwarts not withstanding, the idea of boarding school is one that horrifies most of us muggles. In our increasingly diverse society, we’ve become attuned to cultural differences — but is there a bigger cultural difference than this one? I mean, if personal circumstances don’t force you to, then why on earth would you send your kids to live somewhere else? And not even to a family home!
But perhaps family is the point — the creation of a superfamily. From time-to-time, human societies have aimed to create in-group solidarity through the collective rearing of children. The Shakers in America, for instance, or the Kibbutzim in Israel. The ultimate example, however, was ancient Sparta, where boys were taken away from their mothers at the age of seven and raised in military barracks. In its own brutal fashion, it worked. Spartan society was so effectively militarised and unified that they held off the Persians, defeated the Athenians and controlled a local slave population — the helots — that was many times bigger than their own. I’m not making a direct comparison between Sparta’s nightmare society and our own dear toffs, but there are… echoes.
As a rite of passage, young Spartan men were encouraged to steal from, attack and even murder the helots. This wasn’t just a test of military prowess, it was a means of dominating the subject population through state-sanctioned terror. It’s a tactic that ruling classes have used at many points in the past — to intimidate other people and to initiate their own.
Again, this isn’t something we’ve entirely forgotten. When we hear tales of anti-social behaviour on the part of exclusive drinking clubs at elite universities we don’t just write it off as the normal student rowdiness. The spectacle of privileged young men throwing their weight around — and their money — provokes a visceral loathing that goes much deeper than the mere politics of envy.
Collectively, we remember.
When he became Conservative leader, David Cameron tried to detoxify the Tory brand. It was out with the “nasty party” and in with “hug-a-husky”. “Banging on about Europe” was replaced with the “Big Society”. But in conflating the nastiness of the nasty party with cultural conservatism, he’d forgotten all about class. That photograph of him in his student days posing with fellow members of the Bullingdon Club did lasting damage. Though comparable to Blair at the height of his popularity, at no point did the electorate ever take Cameron to heart — he was never the people’s Prime Minister, nor could he be.
Looking back, through such instruments as the Sasha Swire diaries, we can see him continually surrounded by a coterie of his own class. His closest advisors, his social circle, were of a type — not the tweedy, LARPing Rees-Mogg variety — but nevertheless out-of-touch, no matter how modernised they considered themselves to be. He, and they, would discover the real modern Britain on the 23 June 2016, but by then it was too late.
When Theresa May took over, she was described by Westminster insiders as “unclubbable”, but to the voters that was a blessed relief. Unfortunately, and as mentioned above, she too failed to understand the Tory problem with class; but at least she wasn’t part of it. Never forget that she pushed the Conservative vote share way above what Cameron ever achieved.
May pioneered the strategy that Boris Johnson perfected, but that brings me to the apparent Achilles’ Heel of my entire argument. How can I say that poshness is problem for the Tories given the result of 2019? Is Boris not poshness personified? Does he not appear in that very same photograph as David Cameron? Has he made the slightest attempt to downplay his class identity?
Well, the answers are obvious, but Boris is to poshness what a pantomime dame is to femininity — an absurd performance put on for the public’s enjoyment. Of course, while Widow Twankey is not actually a woman, Boris Johnson is actually posh. Crucially, though, he very publicly abandoned his own tribe by breaking with Cameron over Brexit and siding with the 52%.
It also helped that so many prominent Remainers became the new snobs, condescending to Leave voters and insulting them with accusations of ignorance and bigotry. Worse still, they went all out to overturn the referendum result. At each stage of the ensuing battle, it was Boris Johnson who stood in their way, while also taking his share of the flak. In defying the Remain establishment, he stuck by Brexit Britain and so Brexit Britain stuck by him.
But what next? Though hardly irrelevant, Brexit is now just one element in the multiple challenges we face as a nation. As for the Boris persona, that joke’s wearing a little thin — and so, perhaps, is he.
The extraordinary confluence of circumstance and personality that allowed the Tories to prevail is unravelling. So where does that leave them?
With a Cabinet, most of whom were privately educated. With an economic policy that still favours the rentier class. With a looming jobs crisis that will hit the poorest workers hardest. With a skills deficit That is still unsolved; a housing crisis that is still unaddressed; and a culture war that is still unfought. And though the “levelling-up” agenda is promising, it is still as under-resourced as George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse.
And, so, as the utility of Boris and Brexit fade-away, the Tories still have everything to prove.
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SubscribeYou say “As was laboriously explained, the Cummings family had driven from London
to County Durham so they could self-isolate on a country estate in an
empty cottage away from the main house ” thus the lockdown restrictions
were fully observed.“
Yes but as others “laboriously explained” the rules were that specifically no-one was supposed to go ANYWHERE once they had symptoms, so he shouldn’t have left his London home in the first place, and he shouldn’t have returned to his office after having gone home to be with his wife who had symptoms.