“Cringe” is such a great word. Virtually onomatopoeic, so vividly does the very weakness of its sound conjure the quivering, quailing inward and/or outward reaction it denotes. And at such times as the run-up to a general election it becomes not just a satisfying term but a vital one, especially when conjoined with intensifiers such as “massive”, “overwhelming” or “full-body”.
So, then, to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s declaration. An unforced one, one he absolutely voluntarily chose to make, from which we can only infer that he thought it a good and helpful thing to say, do remember – in an interview that he went without “many things” as a child because his parents prioritised education (and sent him to the currently £52,000 a year Winchester public school), including Sky TV.
I will pause a moment to let the cringe pass through you either for the first time or anew (sorry – either way I should have issued a trigger warning at the top of the paragraph in case you were holding a hot beverage or newborn child and needed to set it down before the weakening spasm arrived).
Let’s get the immediate practicalities out of the way first before we delve into the real meat of the matter.
One, you don’t manage to put your child through a full public school education by nipping and tucking on domestic entertainment outlay. It’s like saying that millennials could afford to buy houses whose prices are eight million times their annual incomes if they stopped buying coffees and avocado toast. Stop it. Don’t be absurd.
Two, not having Sky TV when Sunak was a child was above anything else a class issue. Middle class people didn’t have it. Upper middle class people didn’t allow their children to watch ITV either. That’s why the British class system is infinitely fascinating and essentially unmappable. We are a people better able to pinpoint someone’s social position by a child’s familiarity with Magpie versus Blue Peter than by looking at a bank statement. It’s hilarious.
So part of the cringe is that Sunak, in trying to prove that he is a man of the people despite being literally richer than the King (partly thanks to his previous career as a hedge fund manager and mostly thanks to his marriage), has only revealed the depths of his distance from the plebs he seeks to court.
The wider cringe comes from the evidence that (in the ITV interview he left D-Day commemorations early to record – when you’ve made one dick move, why not pile others on top) both politicians’, and to some extent the media’s, conception of the electorate is that voters are almost too stupid to live.
The abiding belief seems to be that we vote according only to a candidate’s “relatability.”
The drive for relatability, the notion of it as a desirable thing, is the curse of the age. Sometimes it can be merely annoying, as when celebrities with sub-zero BMIs insist that they eat pizza too; or famous women with children insist they don’t have nannies or any other home help to maintain their busy, successful careers; or Instagram influencers show curated clutter to pretend they live ordinary lives of chaos rather than unattainable perfection.
Nevertheless, it all feeds into the idea that those who aren’t relatable must be wholly dismissed. And that starts us on the journey towards mistrusting people who aren’t relatable for very good reasons. Because they are trained professionals in an area of endeavour the lay person knows little about. Because they are experts in something, perhaps. Perhaps because they have read, thought, studied, researched and understood a subject far better than the average joe and have thereby removed themselves from the ordinariness we are increasingly told to venerate.
And as a result, to know more than average – and to be seen to know more than average – becomes not a valuable thing, and you become not a great resource to draw on, but an enemy, a superior snot making everyone else feel bad; a humiliation. And so society becomes gradually, inexorably culturally and intellectually poorer.
So we are now in the deeply odd and irrational position of requiring everyone in the public eye, but especially politicians, to declare themselves unluckier-than-thou, the better to catch as many people as possible in the relatability net.
When what we need, in fact, are politicians able to say: “I’ve been incredibly fortunate all my life, and this has enabled me to do a job I love, and the literal and emotional resources to go into public service and work for those who have not been so lucky” – and be assured that voters can cope with this slightly more complex thought, and understand that suffering (real or badly conjured on the hoof in an interview) is not a prerequisite for being good at your job.
We place an absurd premium on relatability. But I don’t want my politicians – or my actors, or my scientists, or my doctors, lawyers or teachers for that matter – to be like me. I just want them to be really, really good at their jobs. If I am relating heavily to someone, I assure you that bodes no good for the future at all.