The thing is, once you’ve made it, you’ve made it. Once you’ve got your newspaper column or TV show or made your first million, you’re not working class anymore. And, pretty soon, your endless prole-ier than thou platitudes start to ring a bit hollow. You’re like the rapper on his fourth album, still talking about slinging rock in the hood. I’m not saying there aren’t privileged people who, at 40, still haven’t got over the fact that they went to Eton, but I hate them just as much. I guess the point I’m making is that, once you’ve bought a £1.5m house in the part of Hackney that’s really Islington, we need a statute of limitations on your underprivileged childhood.
That’s Alex Proud nailing wealthy people who endlessly mention their working class roots or even worse embroider the economic context of their upbringing to make it sound more deprived than it really was. His whole jeremaid is worth a read, not least because it includes an embedded video of the Monty Python troupe’s hilarious skewering of “inverted snobbery”.