I began thinking about this column one week before I noticed that Craig Brown had pinched it. Actually written what I meant to write one week before I decided to write it, which I guess cannot be called plagiarism just because I had thought of it first. (If I had, that is.) It’s about the man who wrote Downton Abbey, the greatest and most popular soap opera since Upstairs Downstairs.
It was during a von Bülow lunch in a St James’s club which is also mine, and I was seated next to a plump, bald man who smiled brightly and introduced himself as Julian Fellowes. ‘My wife is lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent,’ was his opening line. I burst out laughing but, in order not to be rude, I said nothing. My first thought was, is he bragging or complaining? Now that I have read an interview he gave to a tabloid newspaper, I guess it was the former. Amazing what fools men and women can make of themselves even in middle age. But to be fair, he also could have said it because he knew that I know what a phoney aristocrat Marie Christine of Kent is.
As everyone outside Hollywood and Wall Street knows, snobbishness is simply an assumption of false superiority. The Fellowes couple seem to practise it with the limitless appetite of the true parvenu. In their interview they admitted awarding black marks if they spotted someone tipping the soup plate towards them. And woe to those who ‘grasp their knife like a pencil’. Now they tell me. I know people who grasp both their knife and fork as a pencil. I also know that pointing this out is even more common than holding one’s knife like a pencil, as is awarding black marks for lack of superficial manners.
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