People love to see middle class families fail. It gives hope to rest of society. If people can be rich, educated, urbane and smug, and still fail as parents, then maybe the rest of us are not so bad. If the posh kid from the nice part of town drops out of school and ends up shooting up in a grimy squat, then everyone else feels that they are less of a failure. He had such advantages, and yet he ended up such a loser, and his irritating mother, for all her parenting airs and graces, failed the fundamental test of being a successful mother.
My sympathy for Julie Myerson and her son is somewhat tempered by the fact that clearly neither of them is particularly bright. How predicatable that the tabloids would strike out against the mother who wrote a book about her drug adict son. Even more predicatable that the son would take the cheque from the same tabloids and indulge their frenzied need for good copy with a vindicative attack on both his parents. I imagine the grandparents and the cousins will be brought into the spotlight in coming days. They are simple-minded folk trapped in the web of tabloid exploitation, and they clearly have not spotted that the joke is on them. They will soon, but by then it will be too late.
So it turns out that the urges of nice middle class families are no different from everyone else, which is even more satisfying for everyone else. A relatively small cheque will have them all turn on each other. Mothers will denounce sons and sons will denounce mothers.
The tabloids, like Jerry Springer, are smart cookies. They have found a way to make money exploiting people like this, and the rest of us.
