“My session with the dons was scheduled for first thing after breakfast, meaning I was staying the night and had an evening to kill in the college bar. Johnson was propping up the bar with his coterie of acolytes whose only apparent role in life was to laugh at his jokes. Three years older than me … you’d have expected him to play the ambassador role, welcoming an aspiring member of his college … Instead, his piss-taking was brutal. In the course of the pint I felt obliged to finish he mocked my speech impediment, my accent, my school, my dress sense, my haircut, my background, my father’s work as farm worker and garage proprietor, and my prospects in the scholarship interview I was there for. His only motivation was to amuse his posh boy mates.”
Do you know what is so maddening about this? Individuals like Johnson, Rees-Mogg, etc, couldn't function in a world without farm workers, garage proprietors, and all the other workers who keep the wheels oiled and the infrastructure running.
If you were cast, shipwrecked on a desert island, or isolated for any other reason from civilisation - who would you rather be marooned with? Those that know how to sow seeds, understand mechanics, can build things from bits of wood... have practical brains and hands? Or an over-privileged elite who has probably never done a day's real work in his life?
An under-educated working class person can learn, can study, can catch up with his / her education throughout their whole lives. Do people like Johnson ever attempt to do anything useful for others, or society as a whole.
I remember reading that the novelist, Evelyn Waugh, one of the biggest elite snobs ever, was always stunned into silent admiration whenever he came across a craftsman, be it gardener, carpenter, etc. He had huge respect for an 'art' that he himself was not capable of.
... and frankly, any wealthy individual who has been raised with any decency and proper 'breeding', always treats those who are supposedly inferior to him, with respect. IMO, Johnson is simply an educated oaf with no social skills or graces. There, I've said it.
