Call out the privileged who claim outsiderdom

Top of my reading pile right now is The Complete Outsider, the collected volumes of autobiography by this paper’s celebrated former art critic Brian Sewell, who died in 2015. I used to share a desk with him, and enjoyed his writing as much as I did his observations about art, cars and sex — major preoccupations.

Brian grew up gay when homosexuality was illegal, but his claim to outsider status always seemed a bit rich to me, much as I liked him. He grew up gay in Kensington, after all; he was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s and the Courtauld Institute; occupied the rarefied art world; and sounded, as John Humphrys put it, “posher than the Queen”.

But outsider status is a badge of honour for those in the public eye. It’s no longer cool to boast of one’s access to the levers of power. You have to be a renegade, an interloper, an iconoclast. We see this in politicians claiming to battle the establishment, and in the cultivation of underdog status by those in TV contests.

I’ve lost track of the number of “radical” chefs I’ve been offered to interview, or the actors, models and musicians who supposedly came from nowhere but who invariably turn out to be the son or daughter of, say, Mick Jagger.

I once interviewed the journalist A A Gill, and he claimed to be an “outsider”. I thought, “Dude, your dad was a leading TV director; you’ve been married to Cressida Connolly, Amber Rudd and supermodel Nicola Formby; you live in Chelsea and you’re The Sunday Times’s most valued writer. Oh, and your best mate is Jeremy Clarkson.”

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A new show asks people to set own ticket prices according to privilege

My wife and I used to be addicted to a mediocre property programme purely as co-host Piers Taylor was called a “maverick architect”. What did he do, we wondered? Build houses upside down or inside out? And how much of a maverick can you be if your name is Piers?

I get it. Insiders are boring. Colin Wilson’s 1956 book The Outsider identified Kafka, Camus, Blake and others, including, by extension, Wilson, as artists outside the norm who changed society.

The desirable individualism of those who stand apart, who kick against the pricks, was cemented by films such as Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One. Today, Quentin Tarantino epitomises the outsider as auteur — someone who makes his own rules, even though he is more deeply marinated in film culture than almost anyone else.

A claim of outsider status is also a way to play down innate privilege. Tiresome “edgelords” such as Carl Benjamin and Count Dankula prop up centuries of patriarchy and prejudice with so-called jokes. Dominic Cummings is considered a “complete outsider” as he went to Durham School and Oxford’s Exeter College rather than Eton and Balliol.

I reckon we should call time on this rubbish. When the expensively educated or the spawn of the famous claim outsider status, it should be accompanied by a klaxon and a list of their insider attributes. But I’ll probably be shunned by the journalistic establishment for saying this. I’m such a renegade, me.

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Read more A new show asks people to set own ticket prices according to privilege