The rise of the posh roadman London's trust-fund babies are fooling nobody

As long ago as 2008, Paul Weller — once known for taking on the establishment with David Cameron’s fave song Eton Rifles — admitted he would be sending his children to a private school lest they end up “coming home speaking like Ali G”. “I’m just not having it,” the Jam jongleur grumbled. His band came to prominence supporting The Clash on the earth-shaking White Riot tour, inspired by the chaotic events of Notting Hill Carnival in 1976. From cutting his teeth on punk to entering cantankerous middle-class fatherhood, Weller had embodied the complete life cycle of cool, the radical struggles of Windrush London trickling into the tediously ironic lexicon of Noughties teenagers.

White kids picking up the slang of ethnic minorities is nothing new; our language is always evolving, a testament to our island nation’s migrant history. But what has changed, in the past two decades, is the specific role of a working-class urban lexicon in burnishing the reps of the very poshest kids in town. Code-switching has become a careful London art, where bad gyals on the bus arrive home to sound cut-glass pleases and thank yous to the au pair.

Of course, the spread of MLE among the middle classes is not simply a nefarious culture grab. It is a natural consequence of diversity in both physical communities and in pop culture, with grime music bursting out of the 2000s London scene at the same time as Top Boy became the toast of Channel 4. The immediate vibe of both — being tough, ruthless, canny — is absolute teenager-bait; but you only need to actually watch Top Boy to think twice about brazenly copying its lingo in the common room. Not just a gangsta romp, it’s a serious study on young black masculinity, on government policy pushing migrant families off cliffs. But no: it seems many teens, who had only ever stepped foot on one kind of estate, watched this and decided the best takeaway would be to add a “ting” or two to their idiolect as a shortcut to gritty authenticity, however forced.

What choice, you might say, do these poor kids have? Being posh is no longer cool. Long gone are the days of Jack Wills supremacy, when lounging about in country piles wearing cable-knit jumpers was all the rage. Saltburn, in which troubled toff Venetia frolicked about on a tennis court with a bottle of Bolly, sparked a brief revival that saw TikTok trustafarians dance their way through listed buildings. To be honest, I’d almost, almost, take a Cotswold shooting party over the “duttiest” Camberwell rave, for at least one is upfront about the number of guests in Debrett’s.

But can we blame this second cohort, skanking to devious beats in a piss-scented lock-up, for putting on a costume? Culture has lurched so far away from Sloane Rangers — and, just as well-heeled graduates find themselves renting further and further afield from their prep schools, fashion has followed them into Brixton, Tooting and Tottenham. Who can blame them for wanting to fit in?

Nor is class and race tourism anything new. In 1957, Norman Mailer taxonomised the Hipster as a fanatical consumer of black culture in a 9,000-word essay. It makes for difficult reading now — not least for its pretty racist thesis that “the American existentialist” (a guaranteed bore) must live with “a sensuous relation to existence” by enjoying bodily pleasures in some sort of hedonistic “primitive” present. It was understandably hated by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. But Mailer’s obvious fetish for what he saw as the liberating abandon within black culture, of its supposed proximity to death and reality, revealed in itself the way edginess tends to pluck choice things from other worlds, borrowing and refashioning until they become accessories for discerning whites, like trinkets from so many marvellous holidays.

It is fascinating that, 70 years on, cool elites are similarly using black argot as a totem of hipness and modernity, framing everything non-white and non-posh as sensual and gritty. But we should be wary of buying into Mailer’s insufferable hipster mode by letting this slip without critique. A recent conversation with an old friend about his moving to Bow was shot through with euphemisms to this effect — that a bit of time in a different “community” (why does this term never apply to the stucco-fronted houses of Westbourne Park?) might be “cool”, “eye-opening” even.

One of the appeals of these fake accents, which is also at the heart of their problematic nature, is that they are perceived as “anti-establishment”. If the system is white, moneyed, strict — a.k.a our parents — then the coolest rebellion must be the opposite. Part of the allure of slang is that it is not understood, or is despised, by a perceived enemy: middle-class parents’ horror at their children picking up MLE only makes it more enticing. For fear of seeming prejudiced, such disdain is best expressed in careful euphemism. In 2010, Emma Thompson told Radio Times that, on a visit to her old school, she urged pupils not to use slang words such as “like” and “innit”. “I told them, ‘Just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid.'”

But is it truly fair to equate the use of slang with intelligence? By doing so, Thompson encircles the most poisonous stereotypes about inner-city teenagers without naming them —  insinuating that hanging around on the wrong side of the linguistic tracks imparts some sort of wretchedness on the speaker. Besides, she need not have worried, for the old school in question was the Camden School for Girls. These clever girls, primed to float demurely into top jobs, know more than most how to code-switch. Indeed, the point about code-switching is that it comes easier to the elite, because the thousand secret signals of privilege cannot be learned from the telly, but from years and years of subtle and exclusive schooling. And whatever we pick up, we can just drop, with no risk of discrimination. For others, not so.

Emma Thompson’s alarm at teenagers “sounding stupid” or jeopardising proper English is therefore a little disingenuous: posh kids will always have RP to hand when they need it. Did Thompson really think the Camden girls would forget how to speak nicely? In reality, if the past 20 years show anything, MLE’s posh adopters do so as a teenage fad — and it will never get in the way of a Fulham boy and his birthright, a job in finance or fine art.

Middle-class parents, then, do not fear linguistic extinction, but their own murky and problematic associations with not speaking “properly” — crime, stupidity, drug use. Really, Cressida… did we put you through Hill House to speak like a gangster? But what they do have right is contempt for the artificiality of the whole affair.

For more than anything, it speaks to the way fashion has come to cannibalise the aesthetics of diversity, feeding the illusion of London as a great bastion of social mobility while only lending cachet to uptowners. Our capital’s youth scene is now one that favours these MLE magpies, so many miniature curators, trying on accents like Marie Antoinette demurely playing peasant in the Petit Trianon. For a generation so tormented by a desire to be candid about privilege, this trend is a toe-curling exception.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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