Class worriers: why posh Londoners want to live like common people

When Chanel creates an own-brand supermarket as the backdrop for its latest show, with models (Stella Tennant, right) cavorting down the aisles as though there’s a new BOGOF at Lidl, it’s official — common is cutting-edge. In straitened times, when the recession is biting deep, the Tories still can’t shake their ‘nasty party’ tag and the rallying cry ‘check your privilege’ is heard from dancefloor to demo, everyone is trumpeting their (often non-existent) working-class roots.

The most recent common people wannabe is Eton Rifle David Cameron. Keen to broaden the party’s appeal, he’s enlisted former PM and champion of the ‘classless society’ John Major to trumpet the Tories’ new apprenticeship scheme. Grant Shapps, the party chairman, hailed Major’s story — rising from his working-class roots to become prime minister — as a ‘symbol of our party’. Um, right.

High society is at it, too. Kate Rothschild, heiress to one of the world’s most illustrious banking dynasties, has taken to eating in Nando’s and dressing like Vicky Pollard ever since she got bored of drinking champagne in Annabel’s with her multimillionaire former husband Ben Goldsmith and started dating rap star Jay Electronica. Just last month a ‘friend’ of hers told the Daily Mail: ‘I was shocked when I saw the pictures [of her in a tracksuit]. One tries not to jump to conclusions, but when she goes out looking like that it is terribly worrying.’ Kate’s erstwhile sister-in-law Jemima Khan has never seemed cooler since she began dating scallywag Russell Brand, who once said: ‘Animals, children and the working class comprise the company in which I’ll feel most at ease.’

Meanwhile, it’s no coincidence that Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey, an acute portrayal of the working class in 1950s England, has made a triumphant return to the London stage, in sharp contrast to the raft of recent upper-crust Rattigan roll-outs. It seems there is a new cultural imperative to celebrate the working classes. No wonder Benefits Street pulled in five million viewers for Channel 4 — numbers you’d expect from BBC One or ITV.

There’s not much left for the upper classes to acquire. Except, that is, a bit of social kudos from either desperately milking any existing low-life connections or seeking out a working-class world in which they can safely dabble. To wit, Tatler has released its first guide to state schools because, says deputy editor Gavanndra Hodge, ‘the best state schools teach young people how to fight for their position in life and not expect things to be handed to you on a plate. These are key lessons for a new generation competing in a global economy.’ Michael Gove has taken note and is sending his daughter to all-girl state Grey Coat Hospital School.

Not that class tension has disappeared, as demonstrated by the recent stand-off between Edwina Currie and voice of the welfare state kitchen, Ms Jack Monroe. Monroe got famous for writing a blog about coping on a £10-a-week food budget in Southend, but Currie went wild with joy when she read in an obituary that Monroe’s grandfather had owned a chain of guesthouses and ergo didn’t hold the working-class golden ticket after all. ‘Nice piece by Jack Monroe. Wealthy family!’ she tweeted just before she went on Channel 5's The Big Benefits Row with Monroe.

A furious Monroe responded: ‘It didn’t occur to me, when I was unemployed and sitting at that Formica table tucking into beans on toast and hot, sugary tea, to ask my grandad if he might be worth a bob or two.’

Poor rumbled Jack Monroe. I feel for her. I have often camped up my working-class credentials. When I was at a fee-paying convent school in Cornwall and told my friends my father worked in a fish and chip shop, they would snigger, but in the London media world, fish and chips work like a dream. During my brief liaison with the late Isabella Blow’s toff husband Detmar Blow, I was told approvingly, ‘Oh yes, heroin and fish and chips, that’s very aristo.’

I’m an impostor, of course. My father didn’t work in the fish and chip shop, he ran it. I’m a bit like that other fake barrow boy, Jamie Oliver, whose parents ran a very successful pub. I’m confident that I got into Cambridge by hyping the fact that I was from a comprehensive school, even though I only went for the sixth form and got a much better education there than from my evil fairy-tale nuns.

I’m not the only one faking it. I don’t know any Hyacinth ‘Bouquets’ in London but I know lots of wannabe Buckets. A middle-class friend of mine is buying a house in working-class Leyton (containing ‘local families’, as the estate agents put it) because she can’t afford anywhere more central. She’s making herself feel better by talking about how ‘edgy’ the area is. Another banker friend dies a little every time she sees her Harrovian son wearing what she calls his ‘chav pants’ — those grey drawstring trackie bottoms. ‘He picked it up from his friend at Stowe [the alma mater of Richard Branson]. Like you see people on council estates with dogs on bits of string and cans of Tennent’s wearing.’ She adds: ‘I don’t think he even likes them. He just wants to blend in.’