The Age of the Lout began with the modern-era Hooray Henry, in the 1990s, a garish, over-dressed, be-suited financial gambler, who frequented wine bars and who was lampooned by tv comedians with the catchphrase “loadsamoney”.
The lampooning was a form of homage.
Hooray Henry thrashed clubs, garden parties, fashion shops, race meetings, wine bars and restaurants. He normalised money-making as a throwaway gambling frenzy. So what if the wine bar and the streets were littered with glasses, many of them shattered, half-eaten plates of food, paper napkins and the detritus of a debauch recently tossed off?
That was Staff’s concern. There was always Staff. They did little hooraying, while working long and underpaid hours in bars, clubs, hotels, taxis, shops, delivery and transport companies.
Hooray Henry went to an exclusive school and university, where he glossed his habits and his entitlement with a smattering of the European classics – Greek and Roman – in environments where only those classics were valued, while the classics of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia were demeaned as exotic, serving merely as plunder for acquisitive and decorative uses by Hooray Henry.
Hooray Henry migrated out of the financial world. He appeared in legal realms, quietly amassing assets and further privilege, including honours from the Kingdom, while tempering the flash, under the steely uniform of pin-stripes, gown and wig.
Another natural migration for Hooray Henry was to journalism, where certain media moguls valued his “excess of snobbish self-esteem” (Cassell Dictionary of Slang) and his “loud voice and ineffectual manner” (Chambers Dictionary).
Hooray Henry realised he could trash the whole country, while running it. Hooray Henry took the short step to Power and burrowed his way up through the mound of lies and invective, by which he plied his trade in words, emerging unscathed from sackings and scandals to mount the highest podium of all, from which he condemned Staff to crawl to food banks, to queue on trolleys in hospitals, to stand on railway platforms where no trains run, ever cleaning up after him, as Staff have always done, at home, at school, at university and at work.
Described, in a kindly manner, as a clown, an oaf, even a buffoon and an eccentric, Hooray Henry is The Lout, “an ill-mannered and aggressive man or youth” (Chambers Dictionary). He is the contemporary manifestation of the fabled Roman Hooray Henry, Loutus Maximus, infamous for his peregrinations between The Senate, The Bacchanalia and the bedroom.
This is the new age of Loutus Maximus.
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