During last night’s emergency House of Commons debate, one image seemed to encapsulate everything wrong with the Eton mess of the new government: Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House in title alone, stretched out on the front bench. A bit like a cat, if that cat was a contemptible 18th-century smarm-baron.
Mogg is routinely held up as a man of good manners. But in addition to being the “physical embodiment of arrogance, entitlement, disrespect and contempt for our parliament” as Labour MP Anna Turley put it, Mogg’s seat slouching simply looks rude.
https://twitter.com/annaturley/status/1168980398166237185
Whether he likes it or not, every MP in the room has—in theory—achieved the same thing to be there and deserves to be treated as an equal. To many, however, Mogg appeared to find his fellow MPs contributions to the debate beneath him; not worth even sitting up for.
Manners vs etiquette
Beneath the mocking memes and shouts of “sit up!” there is a serious point here about the distinction between matters and etiquette. It’s the working class that cares about the former. The upper-class care about the latter.In the working class, we say “please” and “thank you” because we’re embarrassed to ask for, and receive, something if we know it could be at someone else's expenses. We’re told not to discuss money because we don’t want to upset anyone or, if we’re lucky enough, appear gauche.
On top of which, studies show, we’re more empathetic than the ruling class to the plight of others. Not only are we more able to recognise the difficulties that other people face, researchers found, but we’re also more likely to do something about it.
Renaissance manners
There are practical and social reasons behind this. But more than that, we’re taught that we should have manners to improve ourselves. How many working-class mums would go insane at the idea of you having been rude to a friend’s parent or, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, putting your elbows on the table during tea time?Like Eliza Doolittle—from My Fair Lady off the telly, not the play; we’re working-class, after all—we think we can better ourselves by acting “properly.” Implicitly, the idea is that manners will help us be more like our “betters”: the officer class, the gentlemen—the Rees-Moggs.
We don’t live the same lifestyle as these people, have their money or their inherited privilege. But we think by mimicking their demeanours, we can achieve social osmosis and become like them in status.
As social scientists Alan Petersen and Deborah Luton explained this in their 1996 book The New Public Health, this mode of assessing each other dates right back to Renaissance Europe, when—as they write—“public behaviour of individuals came to signify their social standing, a means of presenting the self and of evaluating others.”
This is perhaps not surprising: we all judge others on their behaviour, after all. But what we need to take away is the idea of how and why we present ourselves the way we do, and why the elite does the same.
Our idea of what it takes to be like the Rees-Moggs of the world is founded on a myth. Many of us think the upper class are mannerless—and we’ve thought so for a while. A 2013 YouGov poll found that only 4 per cent of Britons thought the upper class were the most polite class (working-class 13 per cent), while 24 per cent found them to be the least polite (working-class 14 per cent).
Could it be that many of us think the upper-class, Eton educated aren’t the well-mannered gentlemen they want us to believe they are?
The same for all human souls
Writing for UnHerd, Spectator literary editor Sam Leith said of his time as an Old Etonian member of the Sixth-Form Select (basically, higher in the social order; as Leith himself writes, “the swots,” while the “Pops” are the elite grasses): “you walked around the school summoning boys from their classes to see the Headmaster for punishment. This meant that, since you were on the Headmaster’s business, you didn’t technically have to show any deference to the teacher taking the class: you just (and we took special pleasure in this) kicked open the door and roared: 'Is Stewart OS in this division?'”Now, I’m not accusing Leith of anything more than he admits here, nor am I saying that working-class schoolboys are necessarily particularly lovely to teachers. But the anecdote perfectly demonstrates the difference between etiquette—“what behaviour does my social status expect or allow?”—and manners: “what behaviour would show respect?”
Can anyone who went to a comp imagine a situation where they could kick open a teacher’s door demanding to see a student?
Leith actually summarised his article with the same point I want to make when he writes that he suspects the old Etonian order “continues to play a part in our politics to this very day.”
So, too, does its ideas of etiquette. For the likes of Mogg, it’s about staying at the top of a hierarchy. Archaic etiquette, and the hidden rules of an established order, have always been the means by which the upper class assert their betterness and supposed right to govern. It’s not about being polite, it’s about being powerful.
Being working-class I was raised to believe that if I couldn't say anything nice, I shouldn’t say anything at all, but I think mum will let me off just this once.
