The perils of being posh

This week’s wazzock spat hasn’t polarised people in the way that arguments about class often do; most of us have just enjoyed the spectacle of the pop star James Blunt and the Labour MP Chris Bryant exchanging insults. In case you missed it, Bryant said it was a pity the arts were dominated by public school boys like Blunt, who responded in an open letter to The Guardian by calling him a ‘classist gimp’ and a ‘prejudiced wazzock’, and Bryant wrote back to say that Blunt was being ‘blooming precious’. Blunt said he’d become a pop star despite his poshness, not because of it. In 1969, Nigel Nicolson met some girls at a private boarding school who were experiencing a similar kind of posh anxiety.

They wondered whether they would ever escape from the jolly merry-go-round on which their parents had launched them so impulsively. To be on it was fun; to get off would soon become essential, ‘if we are to have a fair start in life.’