Defiantly announcing yourself to be working class, despite massive social prestige, is a tricky look to pull off. Too tricky for Nicolás Maduro, the 54-year-old president of Venezuela. He has been mocked for posting a video on Twitter in which he declaims: “I feel happy that I am a member of the working class.”
Maduro was speaking from the creamy leather seat of his executive jet. Well, there is a debate about what “working class” means. Origins, or current status? Maduro’s “working class” speech in his private jet was no mere accidental blunder. He was overtly saying that his loyalty to the workers is all the more glorious considering his elevated situation. But I suspect that, like many super-successful people, Maduro has found cultivating the memory of tough beginnings to be an exquisite luxury that goes with the private jet: the “working class” claim becomes heroic when it has been personally transcended – and in class terms it is increasingly uncool to self-identify as anything else.
The comedian Ed Byrne had a routine in which he cheekily asked his audience what class they considered themselves to be. A couple of hands went up for middle (he didn’t bother with posh), but the rest of the 800-strong crowd claimed to be working class: “Really? At a comedy show at a festival on a Monday night? There are only working-class people in the room? Really? The middle-class people are being pretty fucking quiet, if you ask me.”
Sub-Banksy housing
Recently in these pages, Aditya Chakrabortty wrote an account of north London’s Haringey council and its high-handed attitude to social housing. He touched on the issue of the Grade II*-listed Hornsey town hall, not far from where I live, to be sold to a developer for “mixed use”, including a cafe and community arts centre, but also a fancy boutique hotel – presumably the main point for the developer. There is very little talk about “affordable housing” on the site.
This adjective is now a key contemporary death knell. “Affordable housing” is becoming like “affordable art” – a quirky little niche offering. You know in your heart that art is really madly expensive and only for the well-off. But here is some “affordable” stuff: zany paintings that could look good on your wall. Affordable housing is getting to be the property developer’s one-off sideline equivalent of a sub-Banksy screenprint for £450, which might possibly be worth £500 in a decade’s time.
The final curtain
The dramatist David Mamet is in trouble for being too controlling: he has banned post-show discussions of his plays on stage. Performance licences include a clause threatening a $25,000 fine for breaking this rule.
It isn’t clear if this applies also to Mamet films, but the world of cinema does have these discussions: Q&As with director and cast. I have often moderated these. They shouldn’t be banned, but some Mamet-style fines are needed for various wrongdoers. People in the audience who start speaking before the microphone has reached them. People who smugly ask over-technical questions: “You clearly used a Sony PMW-F55 for that shot, yeah?” And idiot moderators like me who stare blankly into the auditorium, dazzled by the lights, and murmur like Maester Aemon in Game of Thrones: “Who is that … who is that speaking?”
But for the biggest issue, a Mamet fine is probably not a sufficient deterrent. There should be an SAS sniper on standby behind the stage curtain for people who begin their 25-minute contribution by saying: “Actually, this is more of a statement than a question.”
