The UK’s rampant class anxiety is enabling Tory leadership candidates who want to pretend we live in a meritocracy, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
. Truss’s fibs create her own class mobility mythology – one in which she made it to Oxford and into jobs at Shell and Cable & Wireless despite her childhood.boasted to the Telegraph“I got where I am today through working hard and focusing on results.” Her journey was only possible, she claims, “through aspiration, ambition and enterprise”.
It’s a bit unedifying poring over the details of people’s family backgrounds and financial arrangements, but the nerve of the prospective Tory leaders’ claims, clearly checkable and in the public domain, forces you to do so. But then again, these statements are merely the kind of liberties an entire British social class takes when it is quite normal to say “I have bought a flat”, instead of “my parents have bought me a flat” .
This normalised dishonesty about how much of your success is down to the stability, networks and affluence of your family is not a harmless national quirk. It is a class disavowal that props up the entire corrosive myth of meritocracy – the belief in which enables and absolves cruel governance and mean citizenry.
The most delusional part of this performance is the idea that class says something so definitive about a person’s values or politics that it, alone, would make them suitable to lead. As the sociologist Stuart Hall wrote: “There’s no permanent, fixed class consciousness. You can’t work out immediately what people think and what politics they have simply by looking at their socio-economic position.
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