Middle Class Holes 4 - Caroline Nokes MP

Don’t go with Nokes

It’s time to meet Caroline Nokes, Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North since 2010, and erstwhile Chair of the parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee.

‘I’m not great at flannel,’ she told Politics Home in 2020. ‘So, I like people who are straight talking … I like people who get things done. I particularly like women who are prepared to stand up for themselves and for what they believe in.’

Particularly, it seems, if those women are actually men.

This week’s entry is specific in its focus on a single person and a single topic, but it’s an exemplar of a far wider trend, and of a particular kind of middle classhole.

The writer and local councillor Tom Jones (who you can find here recently summed this syndrome up as ‘the dinner party problem’. Tom wrote;

‘Right now, graduates from elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge [Nokes got her degree at Sussex, but I think Tom’s point still stands] are accelerated because they have the background of a great education. That is fine; but they have, largely, proved themselves incapable of delivering this [institutional] change over the last 14 years. I would question whether their educational milieu means they are simply too susceptible to the dinner party problem - the phenomenon by which supposedly right-wing people moderate their views when in office to avoid being disinvited to dinner parties. Having been to an excellent university is great, but if your university friends are going to become leaders in the Civil Service, the arts, etc, the social cost of enforcing change in those systems is much higher than say, for me, who went to Hull and doesn't know a single artist. What is the social cost for me to say I think we should defund the Arts Council? There isn't any. A complete removal of social costs means complete freedom of action.’

Nokes is the dinner party problem on legs. But she is far from being the only nominally Conservative MP to suffer from it. ‘Hey! You think the Tories are bluff, red-faced old chaps in tweeds down the Monday Club - well, prepare to be surprised!’

You were expecting THIS, eh?

But INSTEAD

Now my degree comes from somewhere far less prestigious even than Sussex (though slap bang next to Nokes’s constituency). And I hate dinner parties. They make me feel like I’m Ruby from Upstairs Downstairs and that I’ve accidentally been seated at the table instead of staring gormlessly at a corner of the kitchen and letting Mrs Bridges’ sauce boil over. And I’ve never worked in politics.

But I’ve been in the ‘dinner party problem’ situation so often; in television, more and more as the years went by and its milieu contracted and became even more left-wing and even more middle class. When one has an agreeable demeanour and temperament - don’t laugh - it is very hard not to join in and nod when the conversation turns, as it inevitably will, to the exchange of approved opinions on the issues of the day. You can either clam up and try to emit serenity or you can tentatively pass dissenting comment in as affable a way as you can. But even the latter course will lead to an exchange of panicked looks between your tablemates, little intakes of breath, the general sensation that you’ve just released an enormous and protractedly noisy gust of gas. The third option is to engage gleefully and set forth to join battle in full argumentative regalia, but this is only for the bold and/or the mad.

You want to be known as the ‘surprisingly nice for a Tory’ conservative, after all. (You may very well not be a Tory, of course, but that is the only way these people can describe you.)

But many actual Tories, particularly the ones selected as parliamentary candidates, have fallen prey to the dinner party problem. Teresa May is the classic example, who set the ball rolling in 2002 by talking about the Tories being seen as ‘the nasty party’ - as if the people who said or thought that would ever vote Conservative. It is a fatal error.

Such people - the Mays, Mordaunts, Barwells and Boleses - were forever saying that the country had changed and so their party should change with it. Well yes, indeed, the country has changed - but not in a way that people actually like. This should be fertile ground - none more fruitful - for conservatives, as indeed it is currently for Reform. Instead, this strain of upper middle class Tory MP became obsessed with ‘what will the neighbours say’, when those particular neighbours were electorally insignificant to them.

Nowhere was this fumbling social awkwardness among Tory MPs better typified than with the gender madness of the last decade or so, and nobody typifies it better than Caroline Nokes. (Though the aforementioned May and Penny Mordaunt come in a close joint second.) The thinking seemed to be as follows: