Laura Craik on the perils of ascending the social ladder

A list of London’s most successful social climbers has been revealed, and the Duchess of Sussex tops it.

Jerry Hall is third. Loretta Basey is sixth. In an attempt not to seem mysogynistic, Keith Tyson is fourth. What do these humans have in common? Well, that they’re ‘common’: either state-school educated or of a lower birthright than a royal. Um. Any two people can fall in love. Love transcends class and economic circumstance. I don’t care if you were born with a silver spoon up your ass, a title and a triple-barrelled surname: if you think otherwise, you’ll never have class.

Some people are natural social climbers, brilliant at dinner parties, always wearing the where-did-you-get-that dress. Others do it from the comfort of their bedrooms, via a series of oleaginous comments on their target’s social feeds. Too young to care about money beyond its ability to purchase Glossier, London kids can smell power from a tender age. For them, power is popularity, popularity is status, and status is king. They’re not bothered who their friends’ parents are, or how much they have in the bank: it’s all about being ‘relevant’, a chilling word they learned from watching vloggers on YouTube. When they’re in charge, will relevancy replace riches? As a value judgement, I don’t know which is worse.

With more people than ever living below the poverty line, it would be fallacious to pretend that money, power and status have no value. And yet whatever we have, we all seem to want more. But then the more you have, the more you want. Only when you acquire this sparkling armada of promises do you realise that happiness doesn’t always sail in its wake. Trust me: the more money, power and status you have, the more bellends you have to deal with. Ask Meghan. Ask Jerry. Ask Keith. Lifehack: choose your friends and partners wisely, and be mindful of the things they can give you that money, power and status can never buy.

Comma karma

The British Library has come under fire for supposedly mispunctuating a sign. Oh, the irony, etc. ‘The whole wealth of human knowledge, endeavour and experience to date,’ it reads. Twitter says there should be a comma after ‘endeavour’. I disagree. I was taught that the ‘and’ functioned as a comma, making the need for one extraneous. If this is no longer true, then truly I feel the sky is crashing down upon my head like Chicken Licken, or maybe Lynne Truss.