Remote Control - Friday 07 February 2014

Why watch rich kids and their hobbies?
The Bullingdon Club. Alive and AwfulThe Bullingdon Club. Alive and Awful
The Bullingdon Club. Alive and Awful

Let’s get this straight from the off.

I’ve never skied. Or sailed. Or rowed.

Or slopestyled.

Sports at my school was the two best footy players picking teams with one team in shirts and one in skins – as in topless in the middle of winter.

Same sketch every week, no seasons.

We also had a crack at badmington. And cricket.

But Sir never said: “Let’s get the luge out.”

Or: “Let’s unfurl the sails on the skiff.”

So I have no interest whatsoever in watching rich people’s hobbies.

And that’s what the Winter Olympics is.

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Slopestyle, a new event this year, was explained on the news this week.

On the news.

Bookended by the brutality of FGM and the impending civil war in Ukraine.

With every move to modernise it, the Winter Olympics increasingly becomes a showcase for trustafarians.

It’s like paying to watch Conservative MP Aidan Burley’s Nazi-themed stag weekend.

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Or standing room behind a cordonned off area to watch the Bullingdon Club celebrate last year’s Glorious Twelfth with a five-days-by-private jet to the South African veldt.

As in handing over cash to gawp at them wearing their navy tailcoats and sky blue silk bow ties and quaffing champagne as they pose over their cadavars.

A full uniform which costs around £3,500 of specially-tailored navy tailcoats, each with a matching velvet collar, offset with ivory silk lapel revers, brass monogrammed buttons, a mustard waistcoat and bow tie.

Only in Sochi they’ll be donning £3,500 salopettes – more than my car cost.

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But they’ll still be surrounded by empty headed débutantes and their giggling supplicant curtsies.

It’s as if the Winter Olympics is now part of the aristocratical coming out season alongside the Badmington Horse Trials, The Boat Race, Henley Royal Regatta, Guards Polo Club, Wimbledon and Cowes Week.

The inbred privileged acting coy at some cotillion ball, looking for deb’s delight, to further inbreed.

All while the rest of the nation is on its knees.

They’re still having their flashy weekends on the slopes, raking in a fortune through little effort.

Like the Middletons.

And their new image rights deals.

Like Rio Ferdinand’s.

Image rights on the most over-rated bum in history.

That’s Pippa’s not the United centre half’s.

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Thus blowing out of the water that this listless class is for the nation’s benefit.

So if it’s all right by you I won’t be watching a single second of slopestyle.

The Olympics proper gives us Jessica Ennis, who learned her trade on a track since demolished by the ruling classes.

Running and jumping.

Not skills that can only be honed by people who ‘winter’ in Gstaad.

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And what’s worse the whole charade brings out rampent nationalism.

I give you a patriot’s pride over some curling women from the back of beyond.

How can anyone gleen vacarious joy over people with a brush from a country that’s gearing up to vote for independence?

So when you’re watching the fawning presenters this week, remember you’re propping up your own subjugation.

Alan Burrows