26 Monday June 13 2022 | the times
Comment
British that I really noticed. MLE
isn’t just usual teenspeak, it’s broader;
a new dialect created by London kids
with English as a second language.
Unlike Cockney the “h” is back in;
vowels are a bit Scottish (“face”,
instead of the Cockney “fayce”, is
“fess”); and prepositions and
pronouns are out: “man go shop”.
“Bare” means plenty; “ends” means
neighbourhood. (Which, as Laura
Wright, a professor of linguistics at
Cambridge, has sweetly pointed out,
had that meaning in the Middle
Ages. Don’t tell the kids.)
I find it both super-irritating in
practice and pleasing as an idea.
It’s a mini-story of melting-pot
English in hyperdrive, and
that’s what makes our capital
one of the best cultural
exporters. You don’t need to
travel in London, the world
comes to you, and is made
into something new.Spouting off
I
popped to a
neighbour’s
house to check on
her twentysomething
niece, who was staying
while she was away. It was
bizarre timing: she answered
the door in a panic saying
“the ceiling’s just fallen
down!” I ran with her to her
bedroom, and yes, the ceilinghad fallen, leaving a dirty bomb of
plaster as well as a mighty waterfall
from a broken pipe. I googled what
to do and got the word: “stopcock”.
“Where’s the stopcock?” I shouted
above the sound of a new water
feature hitting the desk and then
bed in a bubbling cascade. “What’s
a stopcock?” she shouted back, like
I had more than the vaguest idea.
We ran around frantically searching
for this unknown unknown, saying
“stopcock stopcock stopcock” while
discounting random fixtures for
seeming unstopcockian.
Stopcock sounds like a prank
word the old have made up
in revenge for MLE. Ditto
ballcock. Why are there so
many cocks in plumbing?
Still, silver linings. My online
research found Britain is
home to the world’s only
national all-female
plumbing company, based
in Yorkshire. Their name is,
excellently, Stopcocks.Preloved island
A
uction site eBay is
sponsoring Love Island
this summer, which got
me excited as I too aspire to
outfit myself entirely in
second-hand items from
eBay. But I can see this
year’s contestants, in their
shiny metallic thongs, needI
know you speak English, but do
you speak English 2.0, a dialect
boiled up in east London,
predicted to displace Cockney, and
now being exported via our music
industry to all British young people
and the world? No? Me neither, and
I’m your teacher for today.
It would help if I had a
conversational partner, like, for
instance, my teenagers. Unfortunately
they converse in this dialect, labelled
by academics “Multicultural London
English” (MLE), precisely so I will
not understand. I suffer the regular
humiliation of my kids telling me I
have, for instance, “peng creps” and
not knowing if they are referring to
my pancakes, breasts, or digestive
system — or if it is an insult. So I do
the old person thing of responding
with a Lady Bracknell-ish hard stare.
(It means “nice shoes”.)
Like so often, it was only when an
American magazine, in this case The
New Yorker, reported on something
Voters may like Starmer just the way he is
Labour leader has yet to make himself known to the public, but he won’t do it through theatrics
“theory of moments”, which has ruled
most newsrooms ever since. Sauter
believed few remember anything said
by anyone on TV or in print. What
they do recall are dramatic, comedic
or touching “moments”.
Increasingly, it is these moments
that give the politician, in the
modern jargon, a narrative. Rayner’s
own case is instructive. Three years
ago most people had never heard of
her. Today there are probably three
features that define her: red hair,
“Tory scum”, “distracting Boris”. It’s a
potent brew that makes her leader
seem relatively colourless. So far he
has failed to make defining moments
of, for example, the Rwanda policy or
unrest in the travel industry.
Yet history suggests tortoises can
and do beat hares. The jibe about
Labour’s greatest leader — “An
empty taxi drew up outside No 10
Downing Street and Clement Attlee
got out” — was wrongly attributed to
Churchill. But Tory wags guffawed
about the middle-rank, middle-class
barrister eclipsed by the great war
leader. They were forced to eat
their words after Labour’s 1945
election landslide.
Of course, Attlee was accompanied
by a bunch of outsized personalities:
Bevin, Bevan, Cripps and his deputy
and tactical Svengali, Herbert
Morrison. Morrison’s grandson has
warned that Labour needs to explain
why people should vote for Starmer
rather than against Johnson. Peter
Mandelson might also have
something useful to say about how
best Labour’s deputy might deploy
her considerable political gifts to
better purpose than highlighting her
leader’s shortcomings.of ten people would fail to recognise
and name more than 30 famous
people fleetingly passed in the street,
and most of these will be actors or
sports stars.
Twenty years ago, I sat next to a
vaguely familiar thirtysomething
woman on a flight to Berlin. Her air
of quiet professionalism suggested
proximity to power — the assistant
to a chief executive I had once met,
perhaps. That day, the Evening
Standard carried a large picture of
yours truly; disappointingly, my image
on the page in front of her elicited
not a flicker of recognition. More
telling, as she boarded sans make-up,
neither I nor anyone else in the cabin
had given Kate Moss a second look.
From James Gillray’s cartoons of
Napoleon and Wellington onwards,
the public has learnt as much about
our leaders through their
peccadilloes as their policies. Leading
figures used to be caricatured
because their features, voices and tics
were so well known: Denis Healey’s
eyebrows, Margaret Thatcher’s hair,
David Steel’s breathy border
hesitancy. If the real thing didn’t give
us enough to go on, satirists would
invent something — Norman
Tebbit’s leather jacket, Michael
Heseltine’s leopardskin loincloth —
that seemed consistent with the
character. But today’s ruthlessly
schooled public figures give too little
of themselves away to be lampooned.
The opposition leader has yet to
make himself known to the
electorate, but he won’t achieve it
through theatrical rhetoric. Labour
spinners might better study what the
one-time boss of CBS News, Van
Gordon Sauter, called in 1982 theT
he Labour Party’s own La
Pasionaria, Angela Rayner,
wants her boss to give it
some “welly”. Apparently, in
private he’s hilarious. When
not in front of the cameras, he oozes
charisma. Unfortunately, aspirants to
Downing Street need to get their
lights out from under the bushel.
Labour’s lacklustre poll showing —
the rudderless Tories, amazingly,
were only two points adrift at the
end of last week — has some of his
colleagues muttering: “Is Keir just
an empty suit with a great head of
hair?” They should hold their nerve.
It’s a fair bet the electorate won’t
be demanding more comedy in
Downing Street at the next election.
I can see why the Manchester
Mauler wants her boss to let rip. She
herself terrifies the Tories, which is
why their MPs gossip about her so
viciously. The comparison with the
fiery Communist who inspired
Republican forces during the Spanish
civil war isn’t misplaced. Dolores
Ibárruri, born far from the genteel
salons of Madrid, dropped out of
school at 15 and had her first child at
- She went on to be a labour
organiser and scourge of both the
fascists and anarchists. The
backstory is eerily familiar, though
one imagines Rayner might balk at
the torture of unruly Trotskyists.
Yet reminding everyone that
Starmer is a careful, forensic lawyer
is not great marketing. At the
recruitment company I chair we
frequently observe that candidates
often miss out on top jobs because of
assumptions about their professional
or ethnic backgrounds. If you have
never met someone, the fact that they
are an accountant (assumed to be
dutiful but dull) or Chinese-heritage
(super-smart and numerate) will
loom larger than it ought. According
to The Law Society Gazette, the
public respects lawyers, but still sees
them as “arrogant, disinterested or
unapproachable”. Talk of forensic
barristers won’t win red wall votes.
Opportunities to change a leader’simage are few and far between.
Prominence on TV, still the
commanding medium, doesn’t mean
the public is paying attention. Very
few people are famous enough to be
recognised out of context. One
young presenter never forgave me
for rejecting his demand for private
transport to work in order to avoid
harassment; I pointed out that his own
mother would struggle to recognise
him if he didn’t have his head in her
fridge. Harsh, maybe, but true.
While the typical adult can recall
over 5,000 faces at any given time,
Dunbar’s number, the number with
whom we can form a meaningful
long-term connection, is only about- Research suggests that eight out
Deputy leader Angela
Rayner wants her boss
to give it some ‘welly’
Give spare places
in boarding schools
to children in care
Frank Young
B
ritain’s private schools are
booming. New figures
reported by The Times last
week show more parents
than ever are opting out of
state education. While this is good
news for private day schools, it seems
boarding schools are not doing so well,
with almost 5,000 places going spare.
Last year one in three boarding
places was taken up by non-British
pupils with parents living overseas.
Instead of selling places to children
of the world’s super wealthy,
ministers should encourage these
schools to give over spare capacity to
disadvantaged children much closer
to home. We shouldn’t be afraid to
stump up the school fees for children
growing up in our beleaguered care
system. It would be cheaper than the
cost of a children’s home place.
In 2020 only 30 children in long-
term care were studying for A-levels
at private schools, out of 27,000 sixth
form boarders. A poor record from a
sector under constant siege.
The “soft bigotry of low
expectations” should not condemn
these children. Just 50 care leaverswent straight from school to our top
50 universities in 2020. Even our
poorest children are three times more
likely to get into a top university.
Why not use our independent
schools to turbo-charge the prospects
for children in care? It certainly
seems to work. A recent study found
that placing disadvantaged children
into a boarding school improved
their GCSE results by at least two
grades in every subject. They do
much better at A-level too.
The social mobility commissioner,
Katharine Birbalsingh, will soon set
out plans to reverse a stagnant
decade for social mobility. Prising
open boarding schools for children
with the worst future prospects
would be a giant leap. Call them
“levelling up scholarships” if you
must. Young people prosper from the
stability and high expectations found
in many boarding schools. With the
right support, children from the
poorest backgrounds can excel.
Many of our top “public” schools
were set up to provide places for
poor children. We’ve been doing this
for hundreds of years. It is only in
recent decades we’ve allowed these
schools to become anything but
public. Nadhim Zahawi was the last
minister to look seriously at this idea
when he was minister for children
under Theresa May. Now education
secretary, he has the power to make
this a reality for thousands of
children growing up in care.Frank Young is editorial director at
the Civitas think tankOnly 50 care leavers
went straight to our top
50 universities in 2020
Trevor
Phillips@trevorptweets
help getting the eBay “look”. First, I
accept I will always wear ill-fitting
shoes, allayed by a sock library of
different thicknesses. Second, I
swoop in after a trend is over, when a
glut of the wrong trousers floods the
market, with their whiff of someone
else’s remorse. Third, I get into
detailed communication with Brian
from Plymouth who apologises that
the cagoule I won in a hot bidding
war has been left in his caravan, and
would next month be OK for posting?Emission complete
A
friend from Norway, where
most new cars are electric, told
me children now call petrol-
powered cars, “farting” cars. It makes
me realise kids’ idolisation of “vroom
vroom” engines is coming to an end.
Their generation is being brought up
on the nightly habit of plugging in to
charge all devices, so it’s natural for
the car to be treated the same. We still
have a petrol car, but it won’t be long
before they go the way of the steam
engine, a few left in “re-enactment
museums” staffed by fanatical old
boys in oily boilersuits, showing little
ones how we used to handle nozzles
spurting stink and danger. One nods
politely and buys a postcard, but
comes away dirty, thinking, “how
can anyone be nostalgic for that?”Helen Rumbelow Notebook
Kids’ lingo is
fascinating
— and ‘bare’
annoying
@helenrumbelow