How to really tell if you’re Posh (or not)

Can you be working class if you were driven to school in a Rolls-Royce? In the recent Netflix documentary about David Beckham, he challenges his wife Victoria’s claim to be working class in a style reminiscent of Jeremy Paxman going at a cabinet minister.

“Be honest! What car did your dad drive you to school in? Be honest!” he says. Victoria sits – simple white shirt, white panelled walls, white linen curtains, smart grey sofa, vase of pink hydrangeas, all carefully casual – ‘OK, in the Eighties my dad had a Rolls-Royce”.

In the Eighties, at my northern Church of England girls’ school, two of my classmates were ferried to and from school in Rolls-Royce. The first one’s father ran a car dealership, the second’s was a man who grew up in the circus, couldn’t read or write, became a miner and invented the coal washing machine that made him a considerable fortune. Both were self-made and their cars a lot smarter than the bashed-up old Volvos and Land Rovers covered in farm dirt driven by the other parents, and definitely smarter than the second-hand Ford Capri my mother rattled back and forth to her job at the university in.

While social mobility has stalled in a similar fashion to my mum’s old Capri, the current best indicator of social class is what occupation the highest-paying parent had when a child was 14, according to a 2021 report by the Social Mobility Commission.

But class, at least in this country, is a slippery eel. While in some cultures, doing the school run in a Roller might be seen as smart, in the UK it’s not that straightforward. The old cliché of the smartest person in the room – or field – being the one in grandpa’s holey cashmere and a 39-year-old Barbour persists, as does the horror of appearing to try too hard.

But – to paraphrase Dolly Parton – it costs a lot of money to look that casual. The weary insouciance of maintaining just the right level of scruff, of valuing the chipped and worn above the shiny and new, is borne of always knowing you can replace them if you have to. And that is simply a more subtle form of showing off than roaring into life, labels out. A lifetime of never having to prove yourself or your status to anyone means you can shrug off normal concerns of being judged by the scruffiness of your shoes or the state of your hair (step forward, Boris Johnson, a classic of the genre).

So how Posh (or not) are you when it comes to these lifestyle indicators?

Cars

For the truly posh, a battered old gas-guzzling Land Rover in some shade of grouse moor definitely trumps a brand new white Range Rover. Life used to be so straightforward. In simpler times, personalised number plates put you beyond the pale. Today, there are so many more spendy car-as-personality pitfalls to trip you up, from fancy alloys, flash custom upholstery, extra loud and shiny exhausts, LEDs under the car, to elaborate finishes and wraps. All of the above definitely NOT Posh. But extra middle-class points for dropping your home charging point into any possible conversation.

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Holidays

The posh love a holiday in some watery, windswept corner of these islands, ideally one with which they have, or can feign, a childhood connection – think large swathes of Somerset and north Norfolk. They can afford it, even during the school holidays, and invariably think the unreliable weather is character forming. Dubai and Vegas aren’t OK, even ironically, and even for someone else’s stag or hen weekend. Holidays abroad for the smart set are about the three Ss: skiing, sunning and swimming.

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Food

We have moved on from a time when it was vulgar to talk about food to an era when often people talk of little else. This is possibly because there are posh parents all over the country smiling bravely as they describe their expensively educated offspring eschewing careers in the City or at the Bar for running actual bars and pop-up restaurants in east London or making their own biodynamic charcuterie in a surplus barn.

And while no one likes a fuss pot or wants to hear about your Special-Baby intolerances, there is a distinct subset of Leonoras and Allegras who’ve made a fortune flogging diet woo: Hashtag Blessed.

For the truly posh, tasting menus at expensive restaurants are far too much like homework and all-you-can-eat buffets are a horror beyond horrors. Despite inappropriate truffles being surely the cranberried Wensleydale de nos jours, what they really want is to pay £50 a plate for something that looks like it was made by a Puglian nonna.

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Appearances

Being too neat, too groomed, too obviously Botox’d, filled, plumped-of-lip, and Love Islanded is alarmingly try-hard to the truly posh. A more desirable aesthetic is to look as though you just tumbled out of the ancestral bed and into mummy’s old couture. Multiple and obvious logos on clothing, bags and shoes are a worry. See also Hunter wellies that have never seen mud, or in any colours other than navy, green or black. Of course, you may have a walk-in wardrobe of immaculate serenity, like David Beckham, but you would definitely keep it to yourself for fear of being seen to be trying too hard.

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Homes

Victoria Beckham’s palely tasteful and pared-back sitting room will never do. For a start, it looks like everything in it was bought all at once, possibly yesterday. The truly posh need some flaking plaster, moth-eaten carpets, gently-fading curtains, tumbles of books, magazines and auction catalogues, and everything covered with a fine patina of dog hair to feel properly at home. Semi- or full-on chaos is the home comfort zone. Anything too neat, too matchy-matchy, grey, beige or cream – even if they’re colours straight off the Farrow & Ball paint chart – will never do. Mess it up a bit. To be truly smart, you need to feel like you can put your feet on the furniture.

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Gardens

The good news is the posher you are, the less you need to weed. When it comes to gardens, blousy, billowing and meadow-y are the orders of the day, and importantly a nod to your green credentials (as you take off on your fifth essential holiday of the year). So rewild your window box and ditch the annuals for prairie planting or a potager. Who cares if that tenderly cultivated row of carrots costs you about four times more per kilo than if you bought them from Waitrose?

Immaculate decking, elaborate pergolas (see BBQ tent for the Beckhams), fastidiously weeded terraces are a bit country-house-theme-park for the properly posh, shades of golf club, overtones of breakfast included.

If you have cut flowers in the house, they should look as though they came from the garden even if they didn’t. Extra posh points if they’re dropping petals and slightly faded.