I won’t say I found it weird to learn that a ‘Poshness Test’ exists for recruiting jobs of power and influence in Britain. Only because I’d always assumed it did, under a polite and euphemistic name: ‘the interview’.
When I was starting out as a journalist I watched a succession of colleagues take significant leaps ahead of me, quickly. In those desolate first few employment years, when you think a break will never happen, I quizzed a friend I worked with at a Manchester magazine on this subject. She’d risen professionally dizzyingly fast. One minute she was writing 150 word reviews of Roni Size’s Reprazent, the next she’s editing a chic style title and explaining Hoxton haircuts on Woman’s Hour, a diaphanous reflection of the late 90s.