NOTEBOOK: by IAN JACK

Thanks to my children I’vebeen watching the latest British sensation on YouTube,which is a three minuteclip called “GapYah”. An upper middle-class student,Orlando, is talking on his mobile to his friend, Tarquin, in west London.Orlando is apparently in Burma, travellingthe world in his “gap yah” —gap year — which is what studentswith rich enough families tend to dobetween school and university. Youmight call it “poverty tourism”. Hetells his friend that in “Tanzanah”,meaning Tanzania, he met a woman who had “like, flies around her eyes”and who looked at him “with this vacantstare but with this sense of enduringhope, yah?” For a second herecognized her as a fellow humanbeing. And then, he tells Tarquin, he vomited all over her. That’s what Orlandodoes: he skips through poorcountries, has adolescent insightsinto their condition, drinks too much,throws up, and then chortles cheerfully at the mess. A hundred years ago asimilar young man might have had “Isay you fellows, what a lark!” as his verbal tick. Orlando’s equivalent is alazy way with vowels and consonants,so that ‘yah’ can mean ‘year’ or ‘yes’.Orlando is, of course, a parody. Ayoung actor and writer, Matt Lacey,created him to satirize, in Lacey’s words, “the great number of peoplewho seem to be leaving these shores tovomit all over the developing world”.In Britain, they’re known as ‘Rahs’and what they have in common is a private education and a place on offer at one of the older universities:Durham, St Andrews and Bristol are among the favourites, though Oxbridgecan never be ruled out. Their sense of entitlement often outweighstheir intelligence.None of this is new. You can catch glimpses of Orlando’s riotous ancestors in the memoirs of William Hickeywhich record with a fascinating detailand candour Hickey’s adventures in Calcutta in the late 18th century.Like many of his compatriots in Bengalat that time, Hickey drank astonishing quantities of claret and brandy (a detail I remember is his spewing from a carriage window, perhaps in Chowringhee) and persisted with a heavy English diet of roast beef and dumplings however hot and unhealthy the season. Diet alone should have secured him an early resting place in the Park Street cemetery,but he survived to live a long and happy retirement in London.The moralism of the Victorian empire put an end to this kind of public excess — the whoring and gamblingas well as the eating and drinking— though the English upper-class buffoon survived as a comic element in literature. In this way, you can see Orlando as a character updated from the novels of P.G.Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, as the latest twist in a long tradition.The surprising thing is that despite all that has happened to British behaviour in the years since— the changes, for example, produced by pop culture — the stereotype still endures. How many people are like Orlando? Quite a few, because my children recognized him as a type immediately and it’s the parody’s accuracy that has made it such a hit.And now a paradox:Orlando and his kind are the butt of popular comedy,and yet within a few weeks it seems likely that Britain will elect a new government that has at its heart a group of men who in their youth were just like Orlando. If all goes well for the Tories, the new primeminister will be David Cameron and his chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne.They and quite a few of their expensively educated colleagues share a common background:prosperous families, the very best schools and Oxford University. At Oxford,Cameron, Osborne and BorisJohnson (now the Tory mayor of London)were all members of the celebrated Bullingdon Club, a socially exclusive dining society the purpose of which, so far as any outsider can tell,is to trash restaurants in drunken sprees and then pay handsomely for the damage. Members dress up smartly in dinner jackets and waistcoats.History records quite a bit of throwing-up. The dry-cleaning bills must have been expensive.Today, nobody in the Tory party is keen to remember the BullingdonClub. Copies of official club photographsfrom the 1980s showing Cameron, Osborne and Johnson can still be found on the web, though theTory party is reported to have tried hard to have them withdrawn. Their membership is excused in terms of “ayouthful indiscretion”. Being an Orlando doesn’t win votes.How then not to be like Orlando?The answer is to sound more ordinary— no more yah-ing, chuckling and braying, no mention of previous pastimes such as hunting and shooting, a new emphasis on pop music and other demotic pleasures. Cameron now likes to be known as “Dave”, just as his political model, Blair, was known by all as “Tony”. Osborne is rumoured to have taken lessons todown-class his voice. The most notable example, however,comes with Cameron’s wife Samantha — “Sam-Cam” in the tabloids — who has an impeccable social lineage. Her father is a baronet and her mother by as econd marriage is Viscountess Astor.The family has large estates in atleast two English counties, and Samantha was educated at one of the best girls’ boardingschools. And how does Samantha sound now? He rvowels are those of a woman who grew up in a London suburb and attended her local stateschool. Orlando, we laugh at; Samantha,we like. If her husband wins, as he looks very likely to, he’ll know that he owes his victory at least partly to social disguise.