What should we do with James Blunt? This is what I have been asking myself. And I am not looking for comedy answers here, such as ‘Lock him in a shipping container and force him to listen to songs by James Blunt’ or ‘Allow him to become a properly recognised bit of Cockney rhyming slang’. No. It’s a genuine question.
I refer, of course, to the enjoyable spat conducted this week via open letters to the Guardian, between the singer (private school and Bristol University), and the shadow culture secretary, Chris Bryant (private school and Oxford), over whether people in the arts are too posh. I don’t know why, even now, it is only people who went to private school and fancy universities who get to write open letters to the Guardian. I suppose we should all strive for the day when such forums are at least also open to people who went perhaps to a grammar school, and then maybe to a decent former polytechnic. Although clearly the good people of Kings Place would not want to descend any lower down the social strata, because then they’d have to go back through the copy, adding the aitches.
Bryant kicked it off, for fairly cynical ‘Let’s not talk about Labour’s plans to keep Tory cuts on arts funding’ sorts of reasons, in the wake of Eddie Redmayne (Eton and Cambridge) winning a Golden Globe for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Certainly, only a certain sort of person could sigh, of the arts, ‘Is everyone just going to be an arts graduate from Cambridge?’ while not feeling it remotely relevant that they themselves, the shadow minister in charge of the arts, are an arts graduate from Oxford, and it’s one of the lasting joys of Bryant that he’s so reliably one of them.
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