Every prime minister is a sociologist. Theresa May drew a distinction between citizens of somewhere and ‘citizens of nowhere’, a sort of riff on David Goodhart’s distinction between Somewheres (rooted, provincial, less well off) and Anywheres (snooty, international, at home on planes and in the corridors of power).
Now Boris Johnson segments the country in a fresh way. He talks about the existence of both rural and ‘oppidan’ Britons feeling ‘under-invested, excluded’ and that ‘their lives and their futures weren’t as important’, and he implicitly opposes them to the elites.
Why oppidan? Oppidan is essentially a posh word for ‘townie’ (from the Latin oppidum). It has a special meaning to almost nobody except those who, like Boris Johnson himself, are alumni of Eton College. Its chief value as an analytical tool may therefore be in analysing Boris rather than in analysing the country.
At Eton, an Oppidan is anyone at the school who isn’t a scholar. The school was originally founded by Henry VI to educate 70 ‘poor scholars’, and the heart of the school was ‘College’, which is where those poor scholars were boarded, fed and educated. But then as now, the sharp-elbowed middle classes saw a good thing and wanted in on the act.
So over the years the custom emerged that some outsiders would be allowed to sit in on the lessons. And as this became a thing, so in due course these freeloaders ended up needing somewhere to stay. They couldn’t stay in College, so various entrepreneurial Mrs Miggins types put them up in boarding houses in the town. Fast forward a few hundred years and the place had been, so to speak, swamped with the buggers. Those boarding houses are now formally part of the school, and the scholars are outnumbered by about 25 to one.
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