i know, i know
OK, I know I promised I wouldn’t mention the ‘people’s royal wedding’ ever again but I can’t hold back on one element which has now raised it’s head on a couple of occasions. No, it’s not the venue, the ring, the bill, the dress or any of that palaver, it’s about the touchy subject of social mobility. Regardless of what happens on the day, does this extraordinary union prove the unthinkable – that true social mobility now exists in today’s society?
Unbelievably, it was only one short generation ago when Lady Diana Spencer, the daughter of an Earl, was openly referred to as a ‘commoner’ by the landed and ruling gentry. But, on the face of it, Catherine Middleton appears to be the real deal. Though her father comes from a line of land-owning mill owners, her maternal grandfather was a builder, great-grandfather a chippy and great-great grandfather a miner. Ironically, he toiled in a North-Eastern colliery owned by the family of her fiancé’s great-grandmother! From pit t’palace in just three generations surely proves everything’s fine and dandy in middle England?
Get a grip! Only in such a whimsical place could the joining together until death do them part of an hereditary prince to the former hockey captain of a £30,000-a-year boarding school, who lives in a gifted £1m Chelsea flat, be seized upon as evidence of social mobility in an apparently classless society. Even the supposedly left-ish leaning Daily Mirror tugged its forelock when reporting that Mrs Middleton had allegedly greeted HRH with the words “Pleased to meet you” as opposed to the socially correct “How do you do?” The shame! She’ll be using her knife and fork incorrectly next and be slung in the Tower to contemplate her wrongdoing. Despite protestations to the contrary, it appears there remains no greater crime in this country than having ideas above your station.
What this marriage does go to show however is just how cunning and conniving the Royal family really are and the fact that they are playing the long game. Former Burke’s Peerage editor Charles Mosley sniffed “there are 120,000 people in Burke’s Peerage. Even if you take out the men, the married women and those too old, that would still leave 10,000 for William to choose from.” Sorry Charles you’re missing the point. The Royal family have long been under fire as an irrelevance, a cold, aloof, Tupperware-toting, one-bar-electric-fire-huddling inbred clan and one that had had it’s day. By positioning William and Kate as an ordinary ‘middle class’ couple where he has stepped down from his Eton perch to that of a working helicopter pilot with an easy down-with-the-kids manner, they’ve delivered a master-stroke and we’ve all been suckered-in. In one fail swoop they’ve saved the dynasty. We all feel safe with the middle classes and it’s only right and proper that the Royal family should embrace them. Gotcha.
