2 Tuesday May 24 2022 | the timestimes2
come second in the Eurovision Song
Contest, with Sam Ryder proving
himself the superior (in uninflated
scoring) of Michael Ball in 1992 and
Sonia the year after. At Glastonbury
this summer are Crowded House,
Noel Gallagher, Supergrass and
Primal Scream. It’s yesterday once
more (although I concede the
reference dates me further back than
the Nineties).
And IRL, it is also plus ça change.
Once again an exhausted decade-plus
of Tory rule demonstrates that
although we are weary of them, some
Tory MPs are not too tired for sex.
“Mellor made love in Chelsea strip!
Night he scored four times with
actress”, hailed The Sun of David
Mellor, John Major’s “minister for fun”.
“Matt finished”, intoned the same
paper 29 years on, after it exposed the
soon-to-be former health secretary’s
affair with an aide. This is the way
Rome fell, we said in 1992. As of
writing, Westminster’s No 1 wine and
karaoke venue still stands, but we have
yet to read the full 50 shades of Gray.
The economy is meanwhile
programmed for a full spin cycle that
will take us back to 1991, the date that,
having been strangled out of the
system by Thatcherism, inflation rose
from its lair. It peaked at 8 per cent.
Thirty-one years on, it is already at 9.
Simultaneously, lurching towards
a struggling household near you,
comes a Nineties-style recession, but
this time unalleviated by a slump in
property prices. Quizzed on the
nation’s parlous finances during the
1992 election, its surprise victor
Major appeared to smile. “It’s not
funny, prime minister,” David
Dimbleby told him firmly — a
truth-to-power moment not dissimilarI’m for the
Sussex
snog fest
When a couple behave
as egregiously as the
Duke and Duchess
of Sussex, it’s easy
to fall into the trap
of slagging off every
last little thing they
do or say.
When Meghan kissed
Harry after his typicalman-of-the-people,
I’m-just-an-ordinary-
bloke game of polo
in Santa Barbara at
the weekend, for
instance, some of my
friends recoiled and
ranted censoriously
about public displays
of affection.I almost joined in.
Then I thought, hold
on, it’s just a snog.
A run-of-the-mill,
young couple madly in
love, carefully staged
for the attendant
cameras snog. That’s
all. Where’s the harm
in that?Robert Crampton
behave at KPMG, but I doubt it. It’s
more than 30 years since boasting
about money was fashionable in this
country, insofar as such vulgarity was
ever widely practised.
My wife worked in the City in the
late 1980s: she doesn’t recognise the
caricature of champagne-swigging
monsters braying about Porsches. But
she did meet an awful lot of not
terribly bright men who owed their
fancy jobs to family and school
connections. As did I, in my early
years in newspapers.
Not just jobs either, but homes.
When I left Oxford in 1989 and came
to London, while I was scouring the
To Let column in the early edition of
the Standard and rushing off to view
a crappy bedsit before someone else
snapped it up, many of my peers
were remarkably relaxed about
accommodation in the capital.
Some were moving back in with
their parents. But a fair few were
enigmatic, bordering on secretive,
about their new domestic
arrangements. Gradually, the truth
came out: a family flat in
Knightsbridge; a house share not
involving any rent in Chelsea; a mews
cottage bought cash-on-the-nail in
Islington. “Ah-hah,” I thought, “they
kept that quiet at university.”
Later, I met Etonians who mumbled
about going to school “near Slough’’.
And colleagues whose lifestyles
simply didn’t equate with their
incomes. And others who kept an eye
on certain share prices — in their
twenties! While not even working
on the business desk! You’d get
talking to someone at a party, or more
likely eavesdrop on a cluster of tall
confident clannish types, and words
like “trusts” and “rents” and “stocks”
would float around.
The point is such insights were rare
and hard won. No one is keen to
advertise unearned income, expensive
schooling or their godfather scoring
them a plum internship. Whereas
they’ll bang on about how their great-
great grandad was a coal miner or,
OK, a manager in a coal mine or, OK,
owned a coal mine all day long.
I’m opposed to the idea that your
salary should be public knowledge. But
I think perhaps your mum and dad’s
salaries, and their mum and dad’s
salaries, should be. It’d be healthy —
and fun, and who knows maybe even a
relief — to get it all out in the open.K
PMG has made
“unconscious bias
training” compulsory
for its 15,300
workforce in the UK.
Such training warns
against the danger of
unwittingly excluding
or belittling colleagues, and clients
presumably, who did not have a
privileged background like you did.
Discussing private schools and ski
trips are given as examples of such
bias. Naturally, the scheme has been
denounced as “mad wokery”, in much
the same way as not being horribly
rude about gays or ethnic minorities
used to be dismissed as “political
correctness gone mad’’.That said, I actually think it would
be instructive if people who enjoyed
a wealthy, well-educated, well-
connected upbringing talked about
their good fortune more openly, rather
than less. My experience is that far
from banging on loudly about their
advantages, the blessedly well-born
tend to play them down. That’s partly
out of guilt, modesty and good
manners, and also partly because the
beneficiaries of old money learn that it
pays not to let on quite how much of a
massive leg up they’ve had in life.
Although I must say in passing that
ski trips haven’t signified great wealth
for many years. Hasn’t anyone in the
KPMG HR department seen the video
for Last Christmas? It came out in
1984: George and Andrew and their
mates don’t exactly look fresh from
the Bullingdon Club, do they?
The stereotype posh and/or rich
person in many films, sitcoms, stand-
up routines and indeed newspaper
stories lords it over the rest of us. That
may be the way some accountantsHow to
count
calories
A survey by the
University of Essex has
found we consume
about 900 more
calories every day than
we think we do. That’s
three cheeseburgers.
Or two chicken and
avocado sandwiches
from Pret if you’re
middle class. With
mayonnaise, yum,
yum. Food turns out to
be like booze, with
doctors mentally
doubling the units
patients claim to sink
in an average week.
I reckon the
researchers might be
mistaken, however. Did
they, I wonder, make
allowance for that odd
and yet scientifically
proven, peer-reviewed
medical phenomenon
that means anything
eaten at an airport, or
on a plane or train, or
on holiday doesn’t
count as calories? And
nor does anything late
at night when you’ve
had dinner but still
fancy a massive snack
before going to bed?
The same goes for
cakes you have only
because it’s been a long
day and you deserve it.
Subtract all of the
above, and I think the
so-called experts will
find most of us are
scrupulously honest
about our intake.Shhh, don’t talk about
skiing at work! No, let’s
be open about privilege
Déjà vu? Why
The TV series
Challenge Anneka
is making a return
— and it’s not the
only thing, says
Andrew Billen
T
hirty years ago no
challenge was too
great for Anneka Rice.
The former journalist
and jeans model, who
in the 1980s became
famous on Channel 4’s
Treasure Hunt for
running around National Trust
properties in a jumpsuit, owned early
Saturday evening television. She did so
by perfecting the art of the impossible.
The format of Challenge Anneka
would impose on her time limits of
a few days to achieve something
miraculous, the precedent having
been set by Christ. A rubbish tip in
Northern Ireland might become a
children’s playground, a lighthouse
painted, a community pantomime
rehearsed and staged. Never did she
pull off these feats alone, but never
did she need to. Just as Rice never said
no to her weekly missions impossible,
no one ever said no to Anneka.
Now it has been announced that
at the age of 63 she will return with
a new run of Challenge Anneka, the
show translated from BBC1 to
Channel 5. She faces her greatest
challenge yet: nothing short of the
restoration of the can-do spirit of the
Nineties, the decade in which the
Thatcher winter thawed and hope
once more sprang.
These were the years in which
the Cold War ended (thereby
terminating history), Clinton, the great
communicator, talked himself to two
presidential terms, and here in Britain
we confidently awaited the coming of
Tony Blair, whose ride to Jerusalem
was bugled by Britpop. Things could
only get better.
And then they got worse. In the
new century, Obama’s assertion of
“yes we can” became Trump’s vision
of American carnage. His weary
apothecary of a successor laments
that there is “poison running through
our body politic”. Can Rice really be
the cure?
In many ways — and I hope this
thought cheers her — the Nineties
have already made a comeback. Gaze
down on a street from the top deck of
a bus: here again are the Brosettes in
their ripped jeans. They buy them
from AllSaints (est. 1994), which once
again sells cargo pants to be worn
with slimline vests. Tops are cropped.
Blazers are back in leather.
The cinemas show The Batman as
they did throughout the Nineties
(but without the definite article).
The Matrix returned. Jurassic Park
is about to reopen. Situation normal
too with the Premier League (founded
in 1992), again regularly topped by
a Manchester club, albeit a different
one. After years of hurt, Britain hasg