The five signs that I became middle class overnight (yes really)

As privileged Kemi Badenoch says a teenage job in McDonald’s made her working class overnight, Chante Joseph, who was born into a working-class family, pinpoints the moments she transformed into a middle-class person

Ascot is often frequented by middle-class people – or those invited by Harrogate Spring... (Getty)

I come from a working-class family in northwest London. However, when I got the notification from Ucas that I had been accepted to study social policy at the University of Bristol, everything was about to change. This piece of paper was to be my ticket out of my humble working-class background; I was now a member of the middle class. Apparently.

While the current best indicator of social class is what occupation your highest-paid parent had when you were 14, according to a 2021 report by the Social Mobility Commission, as Kemi Badenoch proved this week, it is a sliding scale. And, while you can go up, you can go down. Sometimes you can shoot to the top of the Snakes and Ladders of life and other days tumble down to the bottom of the board overnight. Sometimes you can do all of that on the same day.

Kemi Badenoch, seen here launching her bid to be Conservative leader, said a stint working in McDonald’s made her working class (PA)

Don’t believe me? In an interview on Christopher Hope’s Political Podcast, the Conservative Party leader hopeful recalled how, despite growing up in a middle-class household (her parents are a GP and a professor of physiology) she “became working class” when she started working in McDonald’s at the age of 16.

I’m now pleased to know that, at any point in time, I can simply become a different class than the one I was born into. Like class whiplash, when I really think about it, there have been several times in my life where I have become middle class in a moment.

Let’s count them:

When I went to my local Waitrose and squeezed an avocado to see if it was ripe

I could feel the spirit of a “second home in the countryside” pass through me only to abandon me again once I stepped back out onto the high street. My friend assures me I can get it back again though if I use a M&S or Waitrose bag for life instead of a Lidl one. Instant apparently.

Waitrose is arguably the ultimate supermarket for middle-class avocado-squeezers (PA)

Ordering my first spicy picante in Shoreditch House

The first moment I sat at that marble bar, I just knew I had made it to the middle-class elite. On 11 August 2018, I was given a free (working-class) Soho House membership as part of a mentorship programme aimed at young people with creative ambitions into spaces they don’t usually have access to. As I got the train back to south London, where I lived in a small flatshare with two friends, I slowly downloaded my working-class-ness like Cinderella on her way home from the ball after midnight.

Swapping Pret for Gails

During these morning visits, I become the female Jacob Rees-Mogg. I shudder at the thought of doing a weekly shop at Asda, and I have now developed an allergy to Greggs.

Horse riding once every week

It all started when I was at school. Despite being at a less-than-glowing state comprehensive-turned-academy, we’d get to visit city farm stables every fortnight. The first session and the rickety minivan drove us back to Neasden, I felt different. Standing at the school gates and entering the flimsy port-a-cabin classrooms, I just knew instinctively that I was now a bona fide middle-class woman living in the body of a 15-year-old working-class girl.

Being invited to Royal Ascot

Proof if I ever needed it, that I was now as horsey as they come. OK, it was a one-off invitation from Harrogate Spring, but from the moment I stood in front of my mirror with a ridiculous fascinator on my head, I felt the powers of aristocracy fill my body. It was like a reverse exorcism; I was wearing mesh netting and suddenly knew everything about horse breeding and racing etiquette. Amazing really.

Magically middle class: Chante Joseph at Ascot (@chantayyjayy/instagram)

I can’t quite explain the status of this shift in class that both Kemi and I have experienced, but I’m sure you have experienced it too. When I asked my friends for the signs that they too had suddenly become middle class their answers included leaving a job at Peacocks for a job at Selfridges, eating a scone for the first time, trying a truffle and olive oil crisp and watching an episode of Bridgerton. One friend told me after buying a £17 lounge pass for Gatwick South she returned on her easyJet flight only to discover her house had grown another wing, stables and an extra 290 hectares of land.

All jokes aside, if only class was as malleable as Kemi implies it is, maybe I’d have so much more access and opportunity and could pursue it with the old-money wealthy, and not have to worry about where my next paycheque is coming from. The most recent report from the Social Mobility Commission shows that the percentage of children living in relative poverty in the UK (after accounting for housing costs) has risen since 2012 and is now at about 30 per cent and the attainment gap between pupils eligible for free school meals and those not eligible remains largely unchanged.

So, until real progress is made in society, I’ll just have to take a leaf out of Kemi’s fairytale book of delusion and believe that buying my morning croissant from M&S rather than Lidl is to remind myself that I am indeed part of the British aristocracy and don’t have to worry about a thing.