We’re all snobs really

D.J. Taylor’s clever dissection of snobs is really two books in one. Scattered throughout are entertaining, delicious (initially), solemnly related nuggets of hardcore snobbery. He writes brilliantly, for example, about the diarist and National Trust employee James Lees-Milne, who liked a world that knew its place (ideally beneath him). Lees-Milne was steeped so far in snobbery that he couldn’t bear the vulgarity of calling a garage a garage and so called his the ‘motor-house’.

Either the absurdity of this makes you snort with laughter or it doesn’t. It does me, though I have to say the cumulative effect of a zillion snobberies is nauseating. You find yourself thinking, ‘My God, these terrible people’ on every other page. It works in both directions, kind of. Snobs is peppered with examples of reverse snobbery. My favourite is the singer Paul Weller moaning about an album being rejected by the record label:

I’m not used to people talking to me like that. Not because I think I’m Mr Superstar but because I’m not fucking having it. Basically, because I’m from Woking and I don’t give a fuck, d’you know what I mean?

Most popular

Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

All too well, mate.

Lees-Milne is compared to the Labour MP Dennis Skinner who, despite being encouraged to do so by teachers, refused to go to university because he didn’t want to be disloyal to his mining background. I’m not convinced that this is in any way equivalent to straightforward snobbery: there is a pure nobility in Skinner’s choice that is wholly absent in Lees-Milne’s creepy and obsessive stalking of dukes, or in his almost ejaculatory delight at being among aristocrats. Taylor is clearly aware of this, but he might make more of it. East Midlands working men’s clubs in the 1970s may have been hostile to the idea of admitting women, but comparing the policy to that of White’s or Brooks’s is disingenuous.