Is having a posh accent a new ick?

There are few experiences more shudder-inducing than having to listen to a recording of your own voice. Something to do with the way we hear vibrations through our bones when we talk, versus the way we hear air-transmitted sounds, apparently. But for Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith, the exact source of the cringe is more specific: her clipped RP tones. “Oh, I hate my voice,” she recently admitted in an interview with The Times. “It’s too posh. When I replaced Mary Berry on Bake Off someone on Twitter said: ‘Oh no, not that posh b***h,’ and I sort of agreed with her.”

Is it really possible to sound “too posh” in the UK? Has speaking like you swallowed several back copies of Debrett’s become a bit of an ick, to borrow that catch-all term, or even (at a very large stretch) a hindrance, likely to result in the sort of social media vitriol that Leith references? Our attitudes to accents are complicated – probably because they reflect our similarly jumbled feelings about class.

We certainly know it’s something the truly “posh” can get self-conscious about. These days they’re just as likely to drop letters as to carefully enunciate them. A few years ago, a former headmaster of elite public school Harrow (where fees are now just under £17,000 each term) claimed that his pupils would adopt “Mockney” accents in a bid to sound less like, well, public school boys. And Prince William, the heir to the throne, has self-consciously referred to his wife Kate (that’s the Princess of Wales, Duchess of Cambridge, etcetera etcetera) as his “missus”. To make the whole thing even more counterintuitive, Kate has reportedly undergone elocution lessons to become posher; according to royal writer Omid Scobie’s book Endgame, she now sounds even fancier than her princely husband.

In public-facing industries like entertainment, where Leith has found fame, there’s a weird double standard around accents, too. Being upper, or at least upper middle, class is pretty much the norm, because no one else can afford to break in. And, apart from on more formal shows like news broadcasts, presenters often affect a more relatable, less refined way of speaking to connect with their viewers. Think of Dexter, the affluent, privately educated protagonist of David Nicholls’s One Day, now an equally heartbreaking Netflix series, acquiring a much-mocked “everyman” voice every time he’s in a television studio.

Sometimes the process is a little more gradual: when an old Nineties interview clip of the presenter Claudia Winkleman started doing the rounds on Twitter/X last month, it wasn’t her lack of glowing tan and eye-skimming fringe that surprised everyone, but just how much posher she sounded back then compared to now. At the same time, presenters with actual regional accents are apparently told they sound “too common” for the airwaves, as Steph McGovern (who is from Middlesbrough) has claimed.

The same goes for the world of politics: remember Tony Blair’s estuary English? Or when George Osborne temporarily acquired a bizarre “man of the people” accent? What about when Rishi Sunak was mocked for his “geezer” voice on a trip to Essex? Meanwhile, the likes of Angela Rayner (from Stockport) are criticised for sounding “thick” for speaking with the actual regional accent they grew up with. Make it make sense.

Leith might “hate” speaking like a minor royal, but her accent comes with huge privileges, and it feels silly to downplay them. In 2022, research from the Sutton Trust found that accent bias is still a major barrier to social mobility, with attitudes towards certain accents remaining pretty much unchanged since the late Sixties. RP accents are still the highest ranked by the public in terms of “accent prestige”, while those linked to “industrial cities” like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, as well as ethnic minority accents, were regarded as the lowest. Twenty-nine per cent of senior managers from working-class families, meanwhile, said that they had been mocked for their accent at work.

open image in gallery

It’s no wonder that so many people feel the need to smooth out the way they speak in order to get ahead, because they’ve probably absorbed years of snidey remarks and hints suggesting that their voice renders their contribution void. I never forgot the university interview when I had to answer questions on a random passage of literature, and the interviewer randomly suggested that I might prefer “the docks of the Mersey” to the pastoral landscape described in the book (I’m from the Wirral – like Leith’s fellow Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood, coincidentally – so I speak with a very watered-down variant of a Liverpool accent).

If that was their response to a very mild hint of Scouse, then I hate to think how they’d have belittled someone else with a stronger accent. Saltburn, directed by Emerald Fennell (who has, conversely, been ridiculed online for speaking like – checks notes – someone whose 18th birthday photos were published in Tatler) might not be a work of the highest realism, but let’s just say I found Barry Keoghan’s tutorial scenes even harder to watch than all the weird necrophilia stuff.

So sorry, Prue, I find all the squirming a bit of a bore. Why not just own your poshness, and acknowledge all the doors it has probably opened, rather than moaning about it?