We have had enough of the posh, surely? What with their squirreling away all the good stuff for themselves, keeping us riff-raff in our places, quietly fueling the toxic war between the squeezed middle, the already squeezed completely dry and the never had a lemon to squeeze in the first place, to act as decoy while they trouser the profits and laugh up their sleeves at everyone else’s stupidity.
If it proves to be true, as Nadine Dorries has repeatedly and vehemently told anyone who will listen, that posh boys stopped her getting into the British House of Lords, we might have something to thank them for; but it is small return, in any case, for centuries of subjugation.
Not everyone agrees, of course, and certainly not a young US woman called Caroline Calloway, who has just published a memoir, the engagingly titled Scammer, detailing how she fibbed her way into St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, and thereby began a picaresque rinse-and-repeat tale of self-invention, social media stardom and exposure that earned her the sobriquet or, less poshly, nickname, “the Gatsby of Cambridge.” (The tag seems to rest largely on Calloway’s manipulation of her origin story, her fondness for parties and the faint similarity between her surname and that of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, rather than a close reading of the text, but so it goes.)
Interviewed recently, Calloway was far more intriguing than the bare bones of her story might suggest, given that chancers are 10 a penny.
She had desperately wanted, she claims, to be a memoirist, and going to Cambridge would provide her with an appropriately dramatic and suggestive backdrop, the quads and bridges and riverbanks easy to populate with students in subfusc, or riotously cavorting at balls, or languidly trailing a hand over the side of a punt.
“I just love everything about Oxbridge and posh country houses,” she said. “For me it wasn’t about having gravitas — it was just about trying to be a part of beautiful things. And I just find so much beauty in posh culture.”
The indeterminacy of “poshness” is part of its power, of course. It allows one to isolate an apparently uncontestable quality — beauty, who could be opposed to beauty? — and obscure its source, its nature, what allows it to thrive. There are many beautiful things beside the cloisters of Oxbridge colleges, or the Palladian frontage of an English stately home, or a perfectly cut champagne coupe proffered on a highly polished silver tray, but they did not seem to exert the same hold over a 20-something from Virginia.
The kind of beauty Calloway preferred was perhaps what Lady Montdore, the monstrous aristocrat in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, refers to as “all this.” The unsuspecting eavesdropper might take “all this” to mean the scale and bounty of Lord and Lady Montdore’s estate, Hampton. What she really means, as Mitford’s heroine Fanny points out, is “position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other possessions of the sort. Lord Montdore owned an almost incredible number of such things, fortunately.”
Sadly, “all this” does not guarantee Lady Montdore’s acceptance among those of her supposed class: “She was not gifted with an aesthetic sense,” notes Fanny, “and if she admired anything at all it was rather what might be described stockbroker’s picturesque.”
Ouch! This when Fanny, one of the novel’s rather nicer characters, has gorged herself on Hampton’s delicious food, wallowed in its plentiful hot water supply and wandered its avenues with a dashing Frenchman, and then pronounced the whole setup a little too perfect. The truly posh: endlessly ungrateful.
When Calloway said she wanted to be part of beautiful things, could the “part of” have been more important than the beauty? It is the million-dollar question (though how vulgar to put a price tag on it) that explains the enduring appeal of narratives of class interlopers in the culture, from Brideshead Revisited’s Charles Ryder to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley to Nick Guest in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Some of them are clever enough to bypass it entirely — Succession’s Tom Wambsgans, for example, wants into the money and power, and seems not to care much for the cheese-paring, crust-freezing parsimony of Harriet Walter’s Lady Caroline Collingwood. (Naturally, viewers did not share his indifference to this wonderful character and one wonders to what extent US audiences felt this vision of the emotionally stunted, reluctant matriarch confirmed all their suspicions about the British aristocracy.)
For a wonderfully sideways take on the complex intersections between class, wealth and power — intersections that invariably favor those who have most of them already — I recommend reading The English Understand Wool, by US writer Helen DeWitt.
It is about 60 pages long and it concerns a 17-year-old girl who has been brought up in Marrakesh, but makes frequent journeys abroad with her French mother (her English father is mysteriously absent throughout). Mother and daughter take a suite in Claridge’s, from which the television is removed and a piano brought in, and travel to the Outer Hebrides in search of the perfect wool, bringing back an entire bolt of tweed to their favored tailor in London to prevent it falling into the hands of the tasteless.
They avoid, at all costs, what the older woman calls mauvais ton — looking like you have not been able to ride a horse since you were five, treating your household staff inconsiderately, wearing unspeakable shoes. It is perhaps unsurprising that all is not as it seems, nor that all manner of malfeasance might be masked beneath a flawless appearance.
One can crack a social code the same as any other, after all, no matter how ingenious those in charge might like to make it seem. Remember that, poshos.
Alex Clark writes for the Guardian and the Observer.
Trying to force a partnership between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Intel Corp would be a wildly complex ordeal. Already, the reported request from the Trump administration for TSMC to take a controlling stake in Intel’s US factories is facing valid questions about feasibility from all sides. Washington would likely not support a foreign company operating Intel’s domestic factories, Reuters reported — just look at how that is going over in the steel sector. Meanwhile, many in Taiwan are concerned about the company being forced to transfer its bleeding-edge tech capabilities and give up its strategic advantage. This is especially
US President Donald Trump’s second administration has gotten off to a fast start with a blizzard of initiatives focused on domestic commitments made during his campaign. His tariff-based approach to re-ordering global trade in a manner more favorable to the United States appears to be in its infancy, but the significant scale and scope are undeniable. That said, while China looms largest on the list of national security challenges, to date we have heard little from the administration, bar the 10 percent tariffs directed at China, on specific priorities vis-a-vis China. The Congressional hearings for President Trump’s cabinet have, so far,
The US Department of State has removed the phrase “we do not support Taiwan independence” in its updated Taiwan-US relations fact sheet, which instead iterates that “we expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the Strait.” This shows a tougher stance rejecting China’s false claims of sovereignty over Taiwan. Since switching formal diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China in 1979, the US government has continually indicated that it “does not support Taiwan independence.” The phrase was removed in 2022
US President Donald Trump, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have each given their thoughts on Russia’s war with Ukraine. There are a few proponents of US skepticism in Taiwan taking advantage of developments to write articles claiming that the US would arbitrarily abandon Ukraine. The reality is that when one understands Trump’s negotiating habits, one sees that he brings up all variables of a situation prior to discussion, using broad negotiations to take charge. As for his ultimate goals and the aces up his sleeve, he wants to keep things vague for
RSS