How to really tell if you’re Posh (or not)

David Beckham says Victoria can’t be working class because she was driven to school in a Rolls-Royce. Oh yes she can, says Debora Robertson, who unpicks the ‘class codes’ from our cars to wardrobes that show where you’re really from

Class, at least in this country, is a slippery eel (Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)

Can you be working class if you were driven to school in a Rolls-Royce? In the recent Netflix documentary about David Beckham, he challenges his wife Victoria’s claim to be working class in a style reminiscent of Jeremy Paxman going at a cabinet minister.

“Be honest! What car did your dad drive you to school in? Be honest!” he says. Victoria sits – simple white shirt, white panelled walls, white linen curtains, smart grey sofa, vase of pink hydrangeas, all carefully casual – ‘OK, in the Eighties my dad had a Rolls-Royce”.

In the Eighties, at my northern Church of England girls’ school, two of my classmates were ferried to and from school in Rolls-Royce. The first one’s father ran a car dealership, the second’s was a man who grew up in the circus, couldn’t read or write, became a miner and invented the coal washing machine that made him a considerable fortune. Both were self-made and their cars a lot smarter than the bashed-up old Volvos and Land Rovers covered in farm dirt driven by the other parents, and definitely smarter than the second-hand Ford Capri my mother rattled back and forth to her job at the university in.