‘A working class hero is something to be.’ Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer must have missed the conflicted, sardonic edge to John Lennon’s lyric, from his 1970 song ‘Working Class Hero’, given their rush to scrub away the whiff of privilege in the crudest manner imaginable. Sunak, desperately, by means of bemoaning a childhood forever blighted by lack of access to satellite TV; Starmer by dully hammering home that he is the son of a toolmaker.
A country pile, a double-barrelled girlfriend and a mock-regal drawl were valued plunder in 1960s pop
As in politics, so in music. In both fields, class anxiety has become inverted. The fear now is to appear too privileged. It wasn’t always thus. Think of Mick Jagger in the late 1960s, dangling a cigarette over an elegantly draped wrist and talking like a louche, disinherited duke. Back then, rock and rollers aspired to the aristocratic. A country pile, a double-barrelled girlfriend and a mock-regal drawl were all valued plunder.
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