Call me a blinkered, moronic, mollycoddled idiot (seriously, I’m fine with this) but I only quite recently realised there was something intrinsically posh about skiing.
Call me a blinkered, moronic, mollycoddled idiot (seriously, I’m fine with this) but I only quite recently realised there was something intrinsically posh about skiing. This isn’t because I grew up doing it; more because I didn’t, really. I thought I knew all about posh pas-times when I was a kid. They were the ones which smelled of waxed jackets and gun oil, which took you into fields in tweed. Skiing, if you lived in Edinburgh, meant a smell of cagoules and mothballs, and the diamond-matted dry slope at Hillend. My sister and I took a course there one holiday. It meant an hour-long, three-bus trek out to the arse-end of nowhere. Elsewhere in the world, Hillend is famous mainly for a particular kind of broken thumb. Posh, not so much.
Even when I was older, and friends started going with their families on skiing holidays to glamorous European destinations, I never quite realised that these were the privileged jaunts of the few. True, now I think about it, they tended to invariably come back with exciting stories about sexual exploits with beautiful blondes from Home Counties boarding schools, but the overall tone seemed to be entirely bunk-beddish and anoraky, and not, frankly, very much like shooting pheasants at all. If I’m entirely honest, I only properly grasped that skiing was a soaringly upper-middle-class thing that you ought to be ashamed about doing when George Osborne got snapped on the slopes at New Year, and the Daily Mail gave it two pages.
I’m skiing this week. It’s only my second time, and I’m on a not very glamorous package holiday to a not very glamorous bit of France. Taki won’t have been here. We came out on a Monarch charter flight from Gatwick; my own screaming family amidst a sea of other screaming families. I have to say, I didn’t feel like part of the Illuminati. That’s not to be all ‘my-skiing-holiday-is-prolier-than your-skiing-holiday’ about it — it’s actually all very pleasant and I’m enjoying it enormously. But if I compare this to my only other experience of skiing on snow, which was at Zermatt two years ago, it’s a whole different sort of beast. Fewer tanned, oiled blond men, more unsmiling lipsticked Frenchwomen. More jostling queues, far fewer Russians. If Zermatt is Eton, this is more Manchester Grammar. And yet, still, if I were a politician I’d be keeping my head down. They caught Nick Clegg skiing last week, didn’t they? Poor sod.
I’m working on a political joke about package skiing holidays. I just need somebody to apply it to. ‘So and so,’ I will quip, when I find the right person, ‘thinks being in the squeezed middle means going on a package skiing holiday.’ I’m aware I’ve ruined it somewhat with the build-up, but I think that’s actually a pretty damn good joke. Because whoever the people on this trip are, they’re not the squeezed middle. They’re the old middle, the middle middle, the educated professionals who don’t live in London, or do, but live in Clapham and points south-west.
I doubt very much the Milibands ski. Look at the shadow cabinet, though, and there are some very natural ski-holiday types in there. Balls and Cooper. Harman, obviously. Not so much the Eagles, alas, which is annoying, given their surname. Still, you know the sort. So it’s quite weird, looking at the people I’m having breakfast with, to think that the likes of Osborne, Cameron and Clegg would be accused of being out of touch with their country for spending their time as this lot like to spend theirs.
When you think of the other ways that various senior coalition politicians might like to spend their free time — shooting, stalking, fly-fishing — skiing seems positively everyman and egalitarian. I met a guy once who spent a while with Cameron, a few years back, when he was just putting the whole Modern Conservative project together. He spoke movingly about the NHS, and education, and house prices and everything else, said this guy, and yet he apparently did it while quite unselfconsciously holding a glass of brandy with the stem between the second and third fingers of his right hand. ‘A photograph of this,’ thought my guy, ‘would ruin you.’ Skiing’s nothing, is my point. Thank God these people ski. It’s possibly the only time they meet the likes of us.
Watching from a distance, there’s something quite peculiar about the way the knives are currently out for the Duke of York. Certainly, his friends are embarrassing and his trade role is an anachronism. But we’ve known that for years. Why the sudden fuss?
I reckon it’s obvious. It’s the Arab Spring. We feel left out. Across the Middle East, and elsewhere, downtrodden populations are rebelling against their hated, unelected dictators, finally deciding that they live in countries which are their own. We’re desperate to do the same, but we haven’t got an unelected dictator. So, we’ve cast around for a hereditary figure with a tiny modicum of official responsibility, but we don’t fancy actually gunning for the Queen because The King’s Speech was quite good. So we’ve settled on Prince Andrew. That’s the best Britain can do. In a way, it’s entirely heartening.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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