Who wants to see the Notting Hill follow-up where it all falls apart? Not me \u2013 I\u2019d rather recover my faith in the possibility of love<\/p>\n
In 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-fashioning. The editor said no \u2013 we had to draw a line somewhere. I deferred, which was annoying, because I was completely right; everything that\u2019s wrong with that film was visible from space.<\/p>\n
And yet, give it its due, it caught the spirit of the age. It has nauseating class politics: the central love affair, between Hugh Grant\u2019s prime minister and Martine McCutcheon\u2019s tea lady, is a fairytale precisely because its emotional centre is lottery-winner gratitude, that a prince might fall for a peasant. And this, looking back, was merely the benevolent, festive face of a derision for the working class that, some years later, my colleague Owen Jones would describe in Chavs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who wants to see the Notting Hill follow-up where it all falls apart? Not me \u2013 I\u2019d rather recover my faith in the possibility of love In 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-fashioning. The editor said no … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}