Thursday 11 July 2019

Two Nations

Between the Conservative Leadership Election, and this Saturday's Durham Miners' Gala, my mind goes back to the summer of 1998. I was portering for the tourists who were staying at my Durham college. For a time, so was a friend from Hampshire. 

He was baffled by the Gala. He could not comprehend that it took over the entire city centre for the day, with road closures and what have you. Who did these people think that they were? How could they possibly be getting away with it? Having grown up with it, I had always accepted it as the most natural thing in the world.

If you grow up in the South as a full-blown toff or, like my friend, as an upper-middle-class person of Whiggishly Tory sympathies, then you just assume your own economic, social, cultural and political dominance. It is not even a question.

All public figures sound like you, and they sound nothing like the bulk of the local population, people whom they and you scarcely notice. If anyone is going to be taking over an entire city centre for the whole of a summer's Saturday, then it is going to be you.

Seen from there, then it is the most natural thing in the world for the Prime Minister to be chosen only by people like you, with the contest being between an Old Carthusian and an Old Etonian, and in constituency terms a Surrey-Middlesex derby like the cricket.

But it does not look like that from the places where full-blown toffs and upper-middle-class Whiggish Tories are not so much thinner on the ground (they are not the norm anywhere) as simply less and less important. That culminates in the old mining areas, which it is worth pointing out are rural. 

Here, to this day and no doubt forever, such people are of only the most limited economic importance, they are of social and cultural interest only to themselves and to each other, and they are of absolutely no political consequence whatever.

Rather, it is the organisation that retains the name of the Durham Miners' Association that can still take over the centre of its county town and cathedral city for the whole of a summer's Saturday every year, and everyone automatically accepts that that is the most natural thing in the world. The contest between Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson is taking place in an entirely foreign country.

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