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TRACEY-DIANE and JISON, who have several hours after-school coaching every day. Mr Nouveau-Richards gets on the committee of every charity ball in London. The upper classes call him by his Christian name and appreciate his salty humour, but don’t invite him to their houses. Jison goes to Stowe and Oxford and ends up a member of the Telly-stocracy, who are the real powers in the land—the people in communication who appear on television. They always talk about ‘my show’.

2   CHILDREN
    The kiddy is the dad of the guy
    At the beginning of the ’seventies the small-is-beautiful brigade mounted a campaign to bring down the birthrate. Family Planning Association supporters brandished condoms outside the House of Commons and at parties sidled up bossily to women who’d just had babies saying, ‘Two’s yer ration’. Middle-class lefties were rumoured to be concealing third babies in attics rather than display evidence of such social irresponsibility. Disapproving ads appeared in the cinemas showing defeated slatterns in curlers trailing herds of whining children along the street. ‘Superdad or Scrounger?’ demanded the Daily Mirror when a man on Social Security proudly produced his twenty-first child.
    In the face of economic gloom, a rocketing dole queue and mothers wanting to get back to work, people probably thought twice about bringing more children into the world. Whatever the cause, the campaign worked. The birthrate in the United Kingdom dropped by 30 per cent. The working classes in particular, having discovered the pill, curbed production dramatically and at the last count were only producing 2.16 children per family, while the upper-middles were down to 1.7. Indeed, the higher you go up the social scale, the smaller the family, although the aristocracy tend to run unpatriotically riot, probably because, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out,
    ‘Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K., but birth control is flagrantly middle-class.’ One can’t imagine an aristocrat having a vasectomy.
    With the working classes on the pill, the middle classes, particularly the wholemeal-bread brigade, started panicking about long term effects and switched to the coil or sterilization. The respectable working class still favour the sheath, described by Mrs Definitely-Disgusting as ‘my hubby always using something’.
    THE BIRTH
    If she has a job, which is unlikely, Caroline Stow-Crat gives it up the moment she discovers she’s having a baby. The office is relieved too; they’re fed up with the endless telephone calls, the Thursday to Tuesday weekends, and falling over the labrador every time they go to the filing cabinet. Samantha Upward tends to work until the last possible minute, ticking away like a time bomb and terrifying all the men in the office.
    Our Queen was born by Caesarian, feet first. When Prince Charles was born the Duke of Edinburgh was playing squash. Today he would probably have been squashed into the maternity ward of St Mary’s Paddington. The higher socio-economic classes now tend to favour epidural injections which make the whole thing less harrowing and allow the husband, albeit reluctantly, to be present at the birth. ‘They do rather get in the way,’ said my G.P. ‘It’s best if they stand at the head of the bed to give their wife moral support, but they keep creeping down the bed to have a look’.
    Despite working-class prudishness this trend will no doubt also creep down the social scale, since that sacred cow Esther Rantzen recently calved with husband Desmond Wilcox in attendance, beaming with besotted middle-aged joy afterwards. The labour wards will soon be as crowded out with nail-biting males as Twickenham during an England-Wales International.
    When the wife of Super-dad-or-Scrounger produced their twenty-first child, four of the children were allowed to watch. Perhaps the television had broken down. ‘It was very exciting,’ said the eight year-old afterwards.
    The upper classes are not