Speech and Drama?

There are plenty of political grounds on which to criticise Lara Bird, but British people's accents routinely yet unconsciously shift depending on the company or the audience. My own changes markedly between the University of Durham, the largely middle-class village eight miles away where I have lived since 1990, and the old pit village less than two miles away again where I spent much of my childhood, or the old steel town five miles in the other direction. It never becomes RP or Pitmatic, but I cannot do it to order, and I would consciously have to stop myself.

Saint Helenians are an entirely English-speaking community of British citizens whose speech in Britain, and historically in Saint Helena if less so now, varies markedly depending on who is in the room. Indeed, it can do so depending on the room itself. Without the slightest social insecurity, which is not my background there any more than here, many of the same individuals will have sounded quite different during my grandmother's funeral this morning and at the wake this afternoon.

So light and middle-class that I had grown up thinking that I did not have it, my County Durham accent was mocked at Durham, so heaven knows what Bridget Phillipson had to laugh off at Oxford. But while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as far-fetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. Labour came to power when she was 13. Working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26. If her council house had no heating upstairs, then why was that matter not addressed by her Labour council? Her mother was on it.