Time to blend with big society: Do you have social fluidity?

Don’t mention the mansion and swot up on Saturday TV — the PM wants his kids to blend with big society, says Anne McElvoy
Blending in: the successful will be those who can talk to all without summoning up images of trust funds and labradors (Picture: Getty)
Anne McElvoy @annemcelvoy20 October 2014

What are the upper orders coming to? The Prime Minister and his wife are reported to want their daughter Nancy to grow up with the 21st-century skill of being “socially fluid”— the intangible asset that makes someone able to converse just as easily with a baronet as a handyman — without sounding condescending. To this end, the Camerons are looking for a good state school for their daughter, an event that was until recently as unthinkable in their social tribe as Dame Maggie Smith popping out from Downton for Sunday- night bingo and a kebab.

Post-austerity and mid-globalisation, the mannerisms of the posh or entitled can grate or isolate. So gone are the days when even Tories who had not gone to Eton could casually be dubbed “oiks”. The next generation of the truly successful will be those who can talk to the rest of the country and those beyond it, without summoning up images of trust funds and labradors.

In sociology-speak, social fluidity means the ability to move up or down the income or status scale. Truly, though, we cannot imagine the Cameron offspring ending up on the supermarket checkout. So the phrase has come to mean the ability to escape pigeon holes that might restrict options or alienate people.

Big-name public schools are a mixed blessing in this matter. North London examples such as University College School (Tristram Hunt’s alma mater) or Highgate (where Boris Johnson’s brood attend) carry less overt social branding than St Paul’s Girls or Westminster. St Marylebone School for girls attracts those in search of social fluidity, so does Grey Coat Hospital school, which looks like the Camerons’ target.

Fortunately, all teenagers now look the same in the middle and upper class: skinny jeans, eye-liner and long straight hair for girls, and a bit of Abercrombie & Fitch with trailing iPod wires for boys, so we are spared the what-to-wear social nightmares of my generation — the same vintage as Dave’s. I turned up at Oxford dressed very neatly in high-heeled shoes and wondered why all the smart London day-school girls were in oversized, cashmere pullovers and bovver boots.

Today the knack of looking ordinary, even if you’re well educated, well-off and well connected, means keeping status symbols discreet. The most “fluid” parents arrive at the school gates in a neat black VW and keep the BMW for weekends. Savvy mums throw on a classless parka for the school run and leave the chic Max Mara coat in the office. Chaps may wear well-fitting suits with a blokeish North Face anorak thrown over it. Family signet rings on the little finger are a no-no unless you want to look like Tim Nice-but-Dim.

Like SamCam, fluid fashionistas talk a lot about their great buys from Zara and Uniqlo and never, ever about the price tag of their Erdem or Phillip Lim. Generally, any financial good fortune must be downplayed. I know one peerless exponent of social fluidity who describes her home in one of London’s priciest streets as “a pile of rubble”. If you must, unavoidably, talk about your grand house in the country, simply call it “a fluke of inheritance”. The US ambassador, Matthew Barzun, is a masterly exponent of the skill, coming from a Brahmin East Coast family and married to an heiress, but he plays Squeeze tracks after dinner and encourages guests to strum a guitar if they feel like it.

We can tell there is a trend here, because most children of very grand families speak in a more classless way than their parents. Mr Cameron, for all his personable ease — and calculated drop-in at Nando’s — was brought up in the Eighties, when rigidities were intact. You can hear echoes of that when he calls his northern minister Eric Pickles “my chum”, which only serves to underline the gulf between them. Annoyingly for Dave, another expert in cross-class style is Dulwich College alumnus Nigel Farage, who sounds like an English Everyman while having a background as a wealthy banker with a taste for good wine and trout-fishing.

Let’s not kid ourselves: distinctions, however diminished, persist because no society is ever truly classless. But in a world where the most successful will deal with other global elites, rather than just with a bunch of people from the same schools and universities, sounding arrogant or inbred is a drawback, not an asset. The Camerons are onto something: a talent for fluidity is preferable to being stuck in the mud.

You’re not socially fluid if you...

Awkwardly use the term “mate” when addressing workmen.

Silently think “HKLP” when a dinner guest “holds a knife like pen”.

Visibly recoil at the words “lounge” or “settee”.

Still buy Colefax & Fowler prints and dance to Bryan Ferry, but only in a marquee.

Live in Fulham.

Eat at Wiltons.

You are socially fluid if you...

Don’t need to change your accent when you answer the phone, whether it’s the boss or your builder.

Don’t notice how someone holds their cutlery.

Like Saturday-night TV.

No longer wince when someone says “toilet” or “nice to meet you”.

Go to Ikea.

Eat at Nando’s.

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