Tatler, the magazine that has a talent for spotting trends and, like all self-sustaining posh organisations (see Eton, for example) a gift for reinvention, has discovered Jeremy Corbyn. Its online edition is casting the Labour leader as a secret toff. Could this be an endorsement? Is Corbynmania such a thing that Tatler is reassuring readers that he is one of them after all?
On Monday the magazine tweeted asking Buzzfeed for Labour posters (perhaps they don’t have the Labour comms team in their little black book). Its website has written up the 11 clues that reveal the poshness of Corbyn, who is pictured wearing white tie. That’s the ultra formal get-up that other Labour leaders, notably Gordon Brown, would never wear because of its association with traditional court dress and its aura as the uniform of a ruling class whose attitudes they entirely rejected.
Last year, Teen Vogue in the US was brilliant at taking on Trump, and if Teen Vogue can talk about politics seriously, why not Tatler. After all he has ignited an extraordinary enthusiasm among young voters. Two-thirds now say they will vote Labour, at least 20% more than actually did at the last election. And while this new core of unprecedented excitement about Labour may have been triggered by the party’s pledge to forgive student debt and provide free tuition fees in the future, it seems to be much more than that, and to spread much wider than among students.
It is clear young people also love a politician who talks politics without caveats. They are inspired by the promise to spend on the NHS and the talk of a national education service, and they idolise a political leader who is pictured hugging old ladies on mobility scooters. Corbyn has so brilliantly succeeded in mobilising youthful idealism and hope for a kinder, more generous future that even Tatler readers are responding.
@BuzzFeedUK do you have any spare Labour posters we could put in the windows at Vogue House? @sophiamcoutts will come and collect them.
— Tatler (@TatlerUK) June 5, 2017
Tatler’s reason for existence is to be quick on new trends, but it also treats politics as a boring joke that only really dull people fall for. In the interests of actual journalism, I thought I had better find out if Tatler’s Twitter account had perhaps been hacked or whether visitors to Hanover Square, which is just behind Bond Street in central London, really were about to see Labour posters in the windows of the Tatler publisher Condé Nast.
This was the answer from the editor, Kate Reardon, via the press office. “It’s high time voters stopped discriminating against politicians just because they are posh. Jeremy, brother of Piers, father of Benjamin and Sebastian, grew up in a seven-bedroomed manor house on a ducal estate in the shires, as such we recognise and defend him as one of our own.”
Well that is a disappointment, if not a surprise. It is not, after all, a version of the trope that led ardent Thatcherites to fantasise that their heroine was, although the daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper, also the illegitimate granddaughter of Lord Brownlow, the master of Belton House where Thatcher’s grandmother had once worked as a housemaid. It is part of the other familiar scoff, class treachery.
It’s not an endorsement, it’s spot the hypocrite, the politician in denial about his privileged origins.
Rather than an outbreak of Corbyn fandom among the upper classes, it is an oblique commemoration of the centenary of the Russian revolution, which is when the idea of class betrayal first gained traction (and usually a gun and a uniform too). Only with Corbyn, it is the wealthy, the upper classes, that is betrayed. The joke is predicated, like all allegations of class treachery, on the belief that accident of birth deprives everyone of choosing their future for themselves.
This has always struck me as mistaken. Even the Queen, surely, gets to choose her own values, whatever she is obliged to do in public.
But the left not only originated the crime, it is just as guilty of perpetuating it; it is this dreary habit that always hovers like a cloud over the project of building a coalition between aspiration and achievement, birth and circumstance, and values and politics. It is harder to escape the politics implied by who your parents were than it is nowadays to self-identify your gender.
Yet maybe it is also a confirmation that Labour has managed in its manifesto to reach out to better-off young voters and their parents (tuition fees, schools and the NHS) and poorer old ones (triple lock, universal social care provision) without jeopardising the ambition of its traditional core of working-class voters to do better for themselves (very little talk of benefits). I am still sceptical that it will be enough. But then, in Tatler terms as well as the left’s, I too am a class traitor.
Meanwhile, Tatler hasn’t got a hope if it thinks that by revealing Corbyn’s secret posh tendencies it will somehow undermine his support, although it may comfort some of its readers to be able to lament his treachery. Somehow, I suspect Tatler doesn’t much mind how the election turns out. There will still be parts of society that define class as an inalienable indicator of status and politics, and they will still be up for the gossip.
