It was when I nearly reversed into two brand new Land Rover Defenders in the car park at my daughter’s prep school that I realised something was going on. Of course, I had seen them before. I live in Oxfordshire where the A-roads are one long parade of Land Rover Discoveries, Range Rovers and Volvo SUVs from one junction to the next. But recently Defenders seem to be the ‘it’ car on the block. Land Rovers used to connote a certain kind of rarified upper-class masculinity – think Prince Philip, think chins hanging out of them on a shoot – but the new Defender, puffed-up and boxy like a fat peacock, unintentionally parodies what marketeers might pompously call its ‘brand heritage’. One senses that Prince Philip, one of the few to have actually been seen dead in a Land Rover, wouldn’t be having any of it.
Like a Chippendale stripper on wheels, the Land Rover Defender hints at robust masculinity and functionality but delivers on none of it because it doesn’t need to.
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