Fritz Teich

The Guardian gave us a taste of this sort of thing during London’s last mayoral election, when it devoted a whole supplement to how awful Boris Johnson was, on the basis of his floppy hair, his bicycle, and his love of quoting Latin. They wheeled out a whole phalanx of suitable semi-famous Londoners, every one of whom would probably sooner die than go a week without Waitrose or latte, and they all shared a self-congratulatory shudder about how unrepresentative this old Etonian was of the people they thought probably lived on the estate next door. It was one of the clumsiest, crassest, most cringe-making things I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. It’s the hate. It’s a handicap. It makes you nuts.