A CLASS ACT
So, John Prescott is miffed with his father for reminding him of his proletarian roots. Julie Burchill, working class girl made good, wonders why the deputy PM is so keen to join the middle classes
I've wanted to be many things in my life. I've wanted to be a Jew, a lesbian, a slut and even, for six weeks when I was 10, a horse. One day, when I grow up, I hope to be a writer. But I have never, ever wanted to be middle-class. And I fail to understand why John Prescott seems to want it so badly. It's like entering a competition with the declared aim of winning the booby prize.
My aristocratic 80s gal pal, Isabella Delves-Broughton that was, was always explaining to me when she was drunk how very similar her class and mine were; didn't believe in education, loved dogs, drank like fish and had next to no sexual morals. It was the insufferable little oiks in the middle, she maintained, who stopped society from being groovy 24-7; saving their money, washing their cars, wasting their lives squirming up the greasy pole. This was overly simplistic and romantic, as you'd expect from a fashionista, but it contained the essence of the truth. Which is that the middle classes are rancid scraps in the middle of the luscious, bad-for-you bread of British life.
I come from a family so profoundly blue collar - father a night worker in a distillery, then car park attendant, then to die from asbestos poisoning contracted as a 17-year-old labourer; mother who worked in a cardboard-box factory - that when I was growing up, there was literally no contact with anyone outside of my class, except teachers. And when I go back, it's still the same; the only people you meet who do not work in factories and shops are first teachers, then bank managers and people bothering you about your council tax. Whatever, they are people there to corrall, process and tax you.
I never wanted to be one of them. Growing up bright and bratty with prospects about as wide as those of a blind pit pony, I nevertheless felt pure unadulterated horror at the offers of teacher training college which were dangled in front of me by simpering careers officers acting as though they were offering me the world on a Royal Doulton plate. Call me kinky, but I just couldn't get that excited about the prospect of owning a rainbow selection of Magic Markers, I told the fool I'd rather be a prostitute, and at the time I meant it.
At home things were no better; between the ages of 12 and 17, I lived in a teenybopper medley of Bette Davis' greatest hits, forever slamming a door or kicking a dog; "You just don't CARE, do you? God! Why was I BORN?" But it wasn't a class thing; it was a hormone thing. I felt oppressed by my circumstances and surroundings, obviously, but I craved a wild decadent life, the sort of life lived by Dorothy Parker and Djuna Barnes and Zelda Fitzgerald rather than the life lived by Oxo Katie. The poverty of aspiration which people ascribe to the working classes is real, but it seems to me that to swap this for the different kind of limitations imposed by the middle classes on their children is no kind of progression.
When I left Bristol to go to work at the New Musical Express at the age of 17, I met for the first time middle-class people who were not yelling at me for not doing my homework. Though supposedly wild and rebellious types, it was immediately obvious what a gap there was between the rest of the office and my fellow below-stairs recruit Tony Parsons, as we sulked and lurked in our Kinderbunker. Even there, middle-class virtues (sic) were present and correct; there were people there who, when they got some drugs, kept them for a special occasion! We - from the Live Now Pay Later/Spend Spend Spend classes - thought this was hysterical. We couldn't have saved a penny, let alone a pill, to save our lives. We spent every penny of our meagre wages on having fun, and the next morning we'd have to take deposit bottles back to the corner shop in order to rustle up the bus fare for work. We were journalists - as far as you could get from a labouring job - and you still couldn't take the prole out of the girl. And even though the stakes are higher these days I haven't changed.
It's partly a style thing. From the moment one is old enough to care what's at the top of the charts, one is aware that popular culture is entirely a side effect of working-class instinct, energy and verve. When middle-class boys do get involved, from Mick Jagger to Kula Shakur to Salman and Martin and Baddiel banging on about footie, the results are predictably and hilariously excruciating. But it's also a politics thing. This society, like every other, was built on the backs on the working classes, and consumed millions of their lives in the process. To aspire to join the class which took advantage of this oppression would seem to me as perverse and illogical as a black American aspiring to be a slave owner.
And of course it's an ego thing. Only if you are working class can you ever be absolutely sure that you made it on your own merits; that Mummy's name or Daddy's reputation didn't open those doors for you. I've met the Coren and Waugh and Lawson kids, and they're sweethearts, but at the end of the day there is about them the lingering whiff of self-doubt that often goes hand in hand with privilege. And they're right to be paranoid; in journalism especially, a profession full of counter-jumpers, people do laugh and whisper behind their backs.
When I finally grew up, in my twenties, and had proved once and for all that I wasn't going to go to teacher training college, I felt so secure in my achievements and so glad that I had come from nowhere that I fell madly in love with my parents working classness; Prescott syndrome in reverse. I discouraged them from calling the middle meal of the day lunch, and suggested that wine wasn't really very good for you, not as good as beer. I was upset when my dad bought shares in newly-privatised industries, but they just laughed at me, endlessly tolerant, always their own people, as they always had been. Wherever they went in my world, they were deferred to by my friends and employers, because this was the 80s and they were the ultimate proof of my meritocratic blood royal. "My God, they're perfect!" said my best friend the Hon. Toby Young when he met them at my second wedding, "You lucky bitch! I bet you got them from Central Casting!" I couldn't even be offended; I knew how lucky I was. I am proud of myself, all the way through, like a stick of rock. The part of me I'm proudest of is where I come from. Because of this, I don't care where the hell I end up. I've already had the golden ticket in the lottery of life; to be born English and working-class and know that you did It YOUR way.
John Prescott has a life - a history, a culture, a reason to feel especially pleased with himself for having made it to the top of a party which for the present, is owned by people with ancestors and woks. Why on earth would he want to trade in a life for a lifestyle?