Love Actually, lockdowns and the vast arrogance of the entitled professional class

How many times have you broken the Covid-19 rules? Some of my friends who are sticklers for the rules in certain contexts freely break them when they really need to, or when they really feel like it. David Aaronovitch, writing in The Times this summer, claimed that he felt justified during the first lockdown in breaking the spirit of the rules by going for extended walks: “I was walking three or four [hours]. I live near big parks… I was going to be OK.”

Libertarians, Aaronovitch argued, should recognise that the rules are malleable in practice; not really even a proper “lockdown”. He was right – up to a point. But the argument obscures the social dimension at stake and the deeper logic of lockdowns. The cultural and physical self-segregation of the professional class, or roughly approximated here as those who “live near big parks”, has been an ongoing phenomenon for most of my lifetime.

Let me direct you towards the films of Richard Curtis, a major contribution to the self-conception of the “new bourgeoisie”. In Love Actually, there are two types of people: the professional class, and the “help”. The professional class lives in a self-segregated world, of cynical love games, fancy kitchens and basically interchangeable forms of labour, whether the characters work in media, advertising or politics. Their preferences dominate both the public and the private sphere: They all send their children to the same lovely state school – elaborate Christmas nativity concert included.

The “help” only exists in the drama insofar as it accepts that the rules of the game are set by the professional class – the mute Portuguese servant wooed by Colin Firth’s character, the simpleton PA to the Prime Minister (Hugh Grant as a facsimile for Tony Blair). They are essentially invisible and indeed can only make their presence felt when they are recognised by the suave middle-class men of the piece, either because they find them sexually desirable or because they take pleasure in gently patronising their “unsubtle” sensibilities.

In the same way, lockdowns operate on the assumption that there are those in whose interests the rules are set, and who can creatively manage their lives so as to avoid the most extreme consequences of those rules. On the other hand, there are those invisible people, for whom the “rules” are not like that at all.

I recall the New York Times journalist Peter Goodman writing about his encounters with people outside of the professional class: “I was horrified to encounter a delivery man wheeling in a load of supplies without wearing a face mask.” He continues: “I asked the proprietor of our local… market why, despite regulations mandating masks, he was allowing unlimited numbers of people to enter his narrow premises… he gruffly waved me away.”

This is the paradox at the heart the new bourgeoisie’s attitude towards the new working class. It tells itself that its self-segregation is practised in a spirit of nobility, in a spirit of care, and yet it does not interrogate the extent to which it holds certain livelihoods to be dispensable, even loathsome.

This is the context for the revelation that Kay Burley broke rules on social distancing to have a get-together for her 60th birthday. She had friends travel across the country. She was photographed hugging a colleague. Her punishment is that she has been taken off air for six months. Pretty extreme you might think.

And yet, she may find that sympathy is in short supply. For it comes back to the social dimension. There are those for whom the new society works extremely well – and they are also those for whom the rules are mere misfortune, their consequences easily negotiated around. The invisible class has no such choice. In this respect Richard Curtis is a prophet for the world post-coronavirus. He saw quite accurately that the styles and status of the old aristocracies had a waning currency in the globalised, new millennium. The future belonged to the professionals. Woe betide you, if you, like the shopkeeper attempt to wave them gruffly away.