Whatever Happened To Your Honour?

Reviewing Cherie Whatever-Her-Name-Is's account of pulling herself up by her bootstraps, Vicki Woods writes:

Fair enough, she did, alongside untold numbers of her lucky postwar generation. She told a poky interviewer (in one of her endless interviews) that ‘my husband was the nice, middle-class public schoolboy; I was the working-class girl from Liverpool’, as though the gap between them was the same as the present-day gap between rich and poor, which it wasn’t. And while she clearly wasn’t born sucking a silver spoon, there were some remarkably toff-y aspects to her life. Yes, her mother ‘worked in a chip-shop’, briefly (so did the millionaire model Agyness Deyn and so — for a week or two — did I), but later she worked as a travel agent and the sisters holidayed swankily in France, Liguria, Ibiza and Romania. Cynics might point out that the second in her family to go to university was her younger sister Lindsey; that her mother went to RADA and her father, Tony Booth, to the Central School. Actors aren’t ‘working-class’, they’re off-piste entirely, classwise. Mrs Blair is 54; she’s been middle-class since her early twenties. One grows tired of retro-Monty Pythonism about other folks’ shoebox roots.

Remember grammar schools and student grants, Mrs Blair?

Remember grammar schools and student grants, Ms Booth?

Most of all, remember grammar schools and student grants, Your Honour?