RUTHFULLY YOURS

The BBC’s mask didn’t so much slip on Friday as completely disintegrate. When Andrea Jenkyns, formerly of the Conservative Party, was elected the Reform UK mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, the Beeb put out one of the weirdest and most telling tweets of recent times. Jenkyns’s victory marks ‘a return to politics for the former Greggs worker and Miss UK finalist’, it said. Greggs worker? Heaven forfend! You could almost hear the sloshing of spilt macchiatos as the Oxbridge tits of the BBC’s social-media team clocked that someone who once served sausage rolls to the hard-up was now a mayor.

It was undiluted class snobbery. It was a sly jeer designed to get the Beeb’s more middle-class readership chortling with gleeful derision at the thought of such riff-raff-coded people now running the country. I was just a ‘Saturday kid’ at Greggs, when ‘I was 16’, protested Jenkyns. Others pointed out that she’s since been a Conservative MP and even a minister in both Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. Doesn’t matter, guys. Thirty-five years ago she heated up Cornish pasties for hungry working-class people and in the eyes of the BBC that makes her a strange and possibly unsuitable person for high politics.

The Beeb deleted the tweet. Maybe someone’s knuckles were rapped. But we could all see what was happening here. For the benefit of non-British readers, Greggs is a bakery that serves piping-hot pastries and sweet treats. It is especially popular on high streets in ‘left behind’ towns. And it has become shorthand among the chattering classes who can’t quite bring themselves to say ‘oik’ anymore. Make no mistake – when the Beeb said ‘former Greggs worker’, rather than ‘former minister’, it was implying that Jenkyns has rubbed shoulders with wrong’uns; with the little folk who not only voted for Brexit but, worse, also prefer a Greggs chicken bake to a salmon and spinach brioche roll from Benugo.

The BBC’s horror at a one-time bakery girl being elected mayor was of a piece with the broader media meltdown over the local-election results. As legions of England’s angry working classes marched to the polling stations to give their ‘X’ to Nigel Farage’s Reform party, the media elites were furiously reaching for the smelling salts. It was a hissy fit of the privileged who were straight-up agog that the plebs were taking a punt on Farage. Reform’s election success could usher in a ‘sinister far-right future’ for Britain, wailed the Metro. Not just a far-right future, but a sinister one! Honestly, if these breathless bozos knew how ridiculous they sounded to normal people, they’d flee the nation in shame.

The priestly twits masquerading as reporters went even harder on Farage. They were lining up to grill him on his ‘dangerous’ messaging. ITV’s Good Morning Britain told him, ‘You’ve whipped up… anti-migration hysteria’. I’m sorry, is this an interview or an inquisition? Farage said his concern is only with ‘illegal immigration’. But, asked the GMB griller, ‘Are you sure your voters are making that distinction?’. Shorter version: are your voters thick as fuck? Fair play to Farage for not standing for such intemperate elitism. ‘I think our voters know what’s right and what’s wrong’, he said. Cue fainting fits among a media class that thinks the only choice the working class should get to make is between a steak bake or katsu bake at You Know Where.

Is Britain fascist now, wondered media loons. Alongside the Metro’s foretelling of Britain’s far-right future, we had Socialist Worker warning of the rise of the ‘far right’ and calling on its readers to ‘STOP RACIST REFORM’. British leftists once trekked to Spain to fight actual fascists – now they damn Big Brenda up the road as a fascist because she voted for a party that wants to limit immigration. The fascism panic went global. Britain’s ‘hard right’ is soaring, said France 24 of Reform’s success. You’d think the nation that suffered the Vichy pox in living memory would know the difference between psycho fascism and the populism of a party like Farage’s.

Why did the oiks do this to us, the comfy classes wonder. They’re analysing Reform voters like their Victorian forebears once analysed far-flung tribes. The normally funny meme page No Context Brits revealed its political colours by showing a sinister man whispering into an old person’s ear, with the man labelled ‘Farage’ and the dumb old bastard labelled ‘Your nan’. Will Hutton denounced Farage as a ‘pub bore’ and said ‘a good Labour government could see him off’. A what? Never heard of it, mate. Owen Jones fantasises that the Green Party, if it gets its act together, might counter the Reform insurgency. Bless. The idea that the working classes would ever vote for a party that hates cheap flights, doesn’t know what a woman is and wants to throw gas and oil workers on to the dole queue is tragically laughable. These are the people who sneer at Reform voters as ‘thick’, even as they go around spouting the post-truth delirium that you can be a lesbian with cock.

This is the rage of the entitled. The media classes cannot believe that the political status quo in which they’ve made money and a name for themselves is being upended, and by people who eat at Greggs, for heaven’s sake. Anyone who doubted that the Reform insurgency represents a devastating blow to politics as usual need only look at the deranged reaction of the media establishment. The piss of the elites hasn’t boiled this furiously since the vote for Brexit. Their fury is all the proof we need that the working classes have just shaken the system to its core.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy