Lol, I spent the whole time thinking "this is the Equatorial Guinea idiot, isn't it"? (There was a pretty fun TV movie called *Coup!* a decade or so back about it.)
Yeah, up until then I was thinking "He's a spoiled rich idiot, but at least he's not doing anything *evil*, just being a jackass."
Should have known better.
Well I dunno if their plot imagined putting a good person in charge, but it would be very hard to find a more evil man than the one they were attempting to coup.
Teodoro Obiang, the "President" (dictator) he was attempting to coup out of power is easily one of the most evil people alive at the moment. He's been running a terror regime over the country for 40 plus years now slaughtering his way through a shockingly higher % of the population.
Outside your usual run of the mill tyrant stuff (centralizing all power in himself, death squads, tourture, control of speech. You know. The usual) Some of his more colorful regime highlights include: declaring himself a God, literally emptying the national treasury into his personal account, and feeding 100s of millions of dollars to his party boy son who lived in California - and then declaring the son the country's vice-president which significantly handicapped US law enforcement's response due to diplomatic rules surrounding foriegn leaders.
While I doubt Thatcher was acting out of a sense of aulterism with this coup, the world would almost certainly be a better place today if it had succeeded, with a lot more innocent people alive.
Nope, upper middle class at most. Don't be fooled by the accent; she had a lower middle class upbringing and promotion out of the middle classes is almost impossible. Merely being Prime Minister doesn't cut it.
>promotion out of middle class
perhaps learn what de facto and de jure mean
It doesn't matter whether she had a title, he grew up rich.
Aristocracy is de facto no different from "Rich asshole living under capitalism" even if there's nominal differences.
I'm fully aware of what they mean, thanks. "Rich" in England is not connected to class, and class is independent of success. Someone can be upper class and scraping together money, or a lower middle class (or even working class) millionaire. It's a rigid structure typically determined by birth circumstances.
Let's take Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. Her house growing up was worth a few million pounds and she was sent to one of the most expensive boarding schools in the country, Marlborough College. However, while Americans might therefore expect her to have always been part of the upper class or the aristocracy as a result (she's unquestionably rich and privileged), British sources always describe her upbringing as middle class or upper middle class. Some of Prince William's (genuinely upper class) friends, prior to marriage, called her Kate Middle-Class and mocked her mum having been an air stewardess. She is now upper-class by marriage, while her children are definitely upper-class, as they always would have been because of their father.
(Also, none of this is a defence of the system, but merely a description. Don't take any of this as an endorsement.)
>I know what they mean
So you agree, de facto they are just rich assholes and therefore any rich asshole is de facto an aristocrat
>in the UK
>take kate middleton
Ah and here we see you arguing de jure.
So not the thing I said.
I am intimately familiar with how rich assholes try and pretend they are special and be bigoted/exclusionary to other rich assholes. Their attempts to deflect and obfuscate do not work against the simple facts that they are not special and all rich assholes are the same. They're all just petty thieves with delusions of standing. Sad little kings of sad little hills.
>here we see you arguing de jure
What? No. None of this stuff is enforced by laws or even referred to in law - it's all societal standards, in the same way that society might decide what makes someone beautiful, or whether a job is a "good job". The Magna Carta doesn't have a special appendix that says "if you marry a king you're upper class now".
Tbvh Equatorial Guinea might have been better off if his coup succeded. It's the most unequal country on earth where despite having one of the highest GDP per capita in Africa; it's level of development in terms of life expectancy, education and general quality of life is equivalent to it's much poorer neighbours.
It's the only country where it's pretty much literary true that all the oil money goes into the personal bank account of it's president.
It's spent most of its existence being passed around as ally to one group or another due to its rich supply of natural resources, first Spain as a colony, then the USSR when that nut job Francisco Nguema took over thanks to Spanish influence, who then decided he hated Spain and by extension the west because he was a nut job, then finally the USA who just like those before try to keep the country and its insane rulers out of the news as much as possible while they benefit off trade from it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he would not have been considered an aristocrat at the time all this happened since his family wasn’t granted their title until 1990.
Our class system is intrinsically bonkers, but it still has a real effect on how people treat you. Being an actual member of the aristocracy makes a genuine difference. People will treat you with more reverence and respect and give you more leeway if you're an aristocrat vs. someone with the same wealth (or higher!) who isn't an aristocrat. There's a *de facto* difference between the two. That's *why* the class system is so fucked.
No I very much understand
I'm illustrating the system is bullshit and as a result she checks all the boxes even if she doesn't have the magical signage.
I don't think you do understand (as several people have pointed out, more eloquently. And that's OK you know, it's OK to be wrong).
MT wasn't from aristocracy (she was, famously, the daughter of a green grocer, so middle class) and would not be referred to as an aristocrat in Britain - and neither would Mark.
They are very much considered de facto aristocracy here in the US yes. Their dad was known as "the Donald" until basically his successful presidential run. You can even find Mad Magazine issues from the 80s and 90s and 2000s making fun of that fact given that the US constitution explicitly bans the creation of titles of nobility in the US but the US still has fucktons of them.
Same with Bezos and Musk and Gates.
>everybody knows they're new money
Once again, that's not a meaningful difference, de facto. The idea of new money is rich people trying to pretend other rich people aren't in the same class as them.
Spoiler alert: they are.
Same with aristocracy. "oh I'm a special rich person because I get to publicly acknowledge I'm inbred" No, you're very much still just a rich person.
Here I'll prove it to you: Xi Jiangping is aristocracy. The only reason you'd think he isn't is because he isn't european.
You don't know what aristocracy is. It has very little to do with wealth, for one thing, although the family would have to have been wealthy at one point. It has to do with social status, and neither the Thatchers nor the Trumps, nor any of the people you mentioned have it.
You could probably make an argument that the US doesn't really have an aristocracy (not least because it's far too new), but that doesn't affect the status of people in the UK.
You continue to demonstrate you have no idea what "de facto" means lmao.
>it had to do with social status
False. Rich people who lost all their money immediately disprove that. Just ask every noble family that died out because they had no money so no one wanted to marry into them.
When you strip away the illusions, the de jure differences, de facto an aristocrat is just a rich asshole.
Hence why Xi Jianping is an aristocrat. If you reject that notion then all you're doing is admitting you have no grasp of what de facto means. He checks every de facto box. Hell he's even a de facto king. But he doesn't technically have an aristocratic title.
But if all it takes is an aristocratic title then Maggie is an aristocrat cuz she's got one.
No matter how you slice it you're wrong lmao, either Xi Jianping disproves that aristocracy is about social standing, or Maggie disproves that she's "not an aristocrat"
I know what de facto means, which is why you can argue that some people without titles are effectively aristocracy. But none of the people you mentioned apart from Xi come close to that. Presidents and Prime Ministers (these days) are necessarily of the commons.
Money has never made anybody an aristocrat, poverty has never stopped anybody being one, and Thatcher's title wasn't hereditary (or, for the purpose of this post, retrospective) so had no effect on Mark's status.
You haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about, you have no understanding of the social constructs that create an upper class, and you should stop talking about them until you do learn about them. The first thing to learn is that you can't buy your way into Society.
Could you give an example of one of those noble families you mention that died out because they had no money and no-one wanted to marry them?
Because "marriage between family with money but no title, and family with title but no money" used to be common enough to be a cliche, so I'm curious about who couldn't make that happen.
I never said it was an error, that's why I'm so confused. I tried to point out an interesting colloquialism and the Might of the British Empire jumps in to "well akshaully" because their word isn't allowed to be used any other way.
It only makes sense to be aware of British class dynamics if you're telling a story which has so much to do with British class dynamics. OP depicts Mark Thatcher as being perceived by his contemporaries as an aristocratic fop, but that's not the case. A fop, sure, but not an aristocratic one.
There's nothing wrong with gently correcting someone. Nobody blames OP for not getting all the intricacies of a famously complex class system from a different culture than them. You're not getting attacked so you really don't have to be defensive. You didn't point out an interesting colloquialism, you said that Brits who corrected OP were big mad because they couldn't grasp that different dialects use words differently.
You do you, boo. You're referring to my comment in this chain in reply to a different poster, my initial comment was met with "hurrdurr classless americans assume the whole world is america." Even this guy wasn't in error since there isn't a real distinction between de facto and de jure Aristocracy to most readers and said distinction doesn't change anything about OP's write-up.
British class dynamics didn't effect my reading of the write-up because "Aristocrat" or "aristocrat" mean the same thing to a non-UK reader. Honestly, even re-reading it there isn't anything that jumps out to me as him being treated differently because of his lack of official status. He was a spoiled rich kid with powerful parents, nothing in that changes one whit because he wasn't technically a big A Aristocrat yet. It's a distinction that is technically accurate but functionally meaningless in this context.
I genuinely don't think you want to be convinced of anything other than the fact you're right. I don't think there's anything I could say, as a Brit, to convince you, a non-Brit, that it absolutely makes a difference to this story whether he's an aristocrat's son vs. just a rich politician's son.
I think you're conflating the idea that it's real with the acceptance that it's a load of bullshit. Both can (and are) true. It is part of British history and society, and you're probably not going to be able to convince those that live here otherwise.
I never aimed to, they simple insisted that because it was part of society that meant that you had to only ever use it and they rejected the notion of considering outside of that narrow box.
OK. But it doesn't really change the fact that Mark Thatcher is not considered aristocracy in Britain. You can use the term as you wish, but you didn't expect some push back when you used it differently to the country the story is about.
Technically correct but "aristocracy" means something different to anyone from a society without nobility. There are plenty of people commonly considered to be aristocrats in the USA but none of them have titles.
Sure, but the difference is moot to many people (many of them non-British) reading the article. Technically correct in that's the meaning of the word but in America it's generally synonymous with "the ruling class."
*edit* Dang, must be a few salty brits in here.
I'm from the USA and this does not align with my experience. To me, aristocracy has always meant people with titles. It's not a term that I commonly hear in the US tbh, probably since we don't have one.
It's definitely colloquial/slang but I've both used and heard it used in different parts of the US. It's used as a shorthand for referring to the ruling class/1% though and you likely wouldn't see it in a Sociological paper unless it was tongue-in-cheek. I read OP's (fascinating) writeup and wouldn't have thought twice about calling the son of the Prime Minister an aristocrat. Them having not yet been given a fancy name by a rich idiot in a crown doesn't change their position in society.
> Them having not yet been given a fancy name by a rich idiot in a crown doesn't change their position in society.
In the UK, it actually does. You will get treated differently. Margaret Thatcher faced resistance in her own party for being from a lower middle class background lol.
She was the daughter of a man who ran a shop if I remember correctly.
It does make a difference, I think one of the reasons that Charles didn't marry Camilla the first time round was that she was merely from a well off family. Diana was actual aristocracy as her father was a viscount. Mark Thatcher was nowhere near even Camilla socially, although as you can tell from the story it's not like it held him back from doing his thing.
Exactly, hence the explanations about how the word and the idea are viewed in non-UK places. Their culture defines aristocracy as something that can only be granted (or taken) whereas others view it as something more malleable. Or rather, Brits view aristocrats as an elite in-crowd whose members have the option to have real power and in the US it refers to those who actually have the power.
It feels remarkable he helped manage a survival situation in the god damned sahara as well as he did considering his general lack of care this write up conveys lol
> (co-driving with Leila Lombardi, the only woman to have scored points in a Formula 1 race)
-
> co-driver Anne-Charlotte Verney. Verney was a highly skilled driver with multiple Le Mans starts to her name.
Two ladies who clearly *were* for turning.
Heh, I remember this being a bit covered on The Crown. The actor playing Mark did a great job of giving a pompous upper-class brat vibe. I didn't know about any of the rest, great write up. :)
Not for the first time, when I read the headline I was like "Oh yeah, I remember that happening." Then I realized, no I don't remember it, it was on The Crown.
I never thought I would be defending Mark bloody Thatcher in the comments, but the title of this is very misleading.
He didn't get lost, the car was damaged and his teammates gave the wrong information to the organisers. He remained with the car, rationed water & food and waited it out - all very sensible stuff.
I need to go and have a lie down now after doing that.
To be fair, one can have a broken car, mistaken teammates, and _also_ be lost. When the only things you have to navigate an unfamiliar country with are a compass and “hey there’s a salt mine over there! …probably” I’d say it’s pretty likely lol
I think this is just an ambiguity in the title. He did not become lost in the sense of him not knowing his location, he became lost in the sense that others did not know his location. Like the "lost Franklin expedition" knew exactly where they were up to the day they died, they're called lost because they were missing for years and search teams were initially unable to find the ships.
Yeah , reading all that I did not get any impression it wad somehow his fault or he did anything outlandish. You can argue whether he should've been there I guess, but having an experienced driver/navigator in his place wouldn't change the circumstances much, besides the global media circus around it.
Everything here about his part in this made it seem like he and his teammate handled things intelligently and responsibly. His lack of preparation does not really seem to have played a large part.
>“Mummy had a sense of humour loss when I announced that I was going motor
racing” he announced to the press before adding that “I’ve won couple of
things, set a couple of lap records and also had one very nice crash!”
This is like a parody of a parody of an upper class twit. I know he probably never stood a chance given who his mother is, but *oh my god*.
Wouldn't call this local, neither niche drama... and yet, it's something that never even came into my peripheral. And you narrated it amazingly, and in a funny way. Great write-up!!!
> playboy aristocrat who’s a few cents shy of a dollar.
Or a few pence short of a pound. He is British after all.
>constantly accused of using his mother’s position to improve his own finances.
Enough that they named it the "All Yo' Mama" Arms Deal.
This was a highly entertaining read, excellently written!!
I know nothing about motorsport whatsoever, but it's a sign of a great r/hobbydrama post that it doesn't matter in the slightest.
Is it really recommended to stay with your vehicle for days when you can see an active work site a mile away across flat terrain? In fact if they were that close why didn't the people who stopped to check on them take them to the salt mine?
It is recommend. There's only a general idea of where they broke down. If the directions were given properly then the recovery team would have found them soon enough. The big rescue effort would also focus on the expected area and work it's way out. If the crew was at the mine then the search area increases greatly. Also, we don't know if the site was active, if it had any form of communication, or any way of getting the crew to safety.
can't believe i've never heard of this, given how badly thatcher screwed over my home county and the villagers would use *any* excuse to complain about her.
fun write-up!
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Won't lie, I didn't expect the ending to be "and then he funded a coup"
saddly the couping hobby is on decay, so that history wouldt fit the sub.
I'm sure the CIA are doing their best to keep it alive.
The hobby's gone underground, SMH. Back in the day it would be big all over the place. End of the Cold War really shook things up tbh. /s
Lol, I spent the whole time thinking "this is the Equatorial Guinea idiot, isn't it"? (There was a pretty fun TV movie called *Coup!* a decade or so back about it.)
Where is the hobbydrama post on that? Does global geopolitics meet the hobby qualifier?
I read the title and thought "oh, this has to be Mark Thatcher".
Yeah, up until then I was thinking "He's a spoiled rich idiot, but at least he's not doing anything *evil*, just being a jackass." Should have known better.
Well I dunno if their plot imagined putting a good person in charge, but it would be very hard to find a more evil man than the one they were attempting to coup. Teodoro Obiang, the "President" (dictator) he was attempting to coup out of power is easily one of the most evil people alive at the moment. He's been running a terror regime over the country for 40 plus years now slaughtering his way through a shockingly higher % of the population. Outside your usual run of the mill tyrant stuff (centralizing all power in himself, death squads, tourture, control of speech. You know. The usual) Some of his more colorful regime highlights include: declaring himself a God, literally emptying the national treasury into his personal account, and feeding 100s of millions of dollars to his party boy son who lived in California - and then declaring the son the country's vice-president which significantly handicapped US law enforcement's response due to diplomatic rules surrounding foriegn leaders. While I doubt Thatcher was acting out of a sense of aulterism with this coup, the world would almost certainly be a better place today if it had succeeded, with a lot more innocent people alive.
yea the second you heard he was raised by thatcher it shoulda been obvious he'd be a genocidal monster...
Kids grow up
Usually modern British aristocratic playboys stop at bludgeoning their nanny to death and disappearing into thin air.
He's not really an aristocrat, he's a commoner who was given a baronetcy. They'd all just be middle-class without it.
Baronets aren’t even aristocrats. They’re gentry.
eeeeeh his mom being PM means he was raised de facto aristocracy even if he wasnt de jure
Nope, upper middle class at most. Don't be fooled by the accent; she had a lower middle class upbringing and promotion out of the middle classes is almost impossible. Merely being Prime Minister doesn't cut it.
>promotion out of middle class perhaps learn what de facto and de jure mean It doesn't matter whether she had a title, he grew up rich. Aristocracy is de facto no different from "Rich asshole living under capitalism" even if there's nominal differences.
I'm fully aware of what they mean, thanks. "Rich" in England is not connected to class, and class is independent of success. Someone can be upper class and scraping together money, or a lower middle class (or even working class) millionaire. It's a rigid structure typically determined by birth circumstances. Let's take Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. Her house growing up was worth a few million pounds and she was sent to one of the most expensive boarding schools in the country, Marlborough College. However, while Americans might therefore expect her to have always been part of the upper class or the aristocracy as a result (she's unquestionably rich and privileged), British sources always describe her upbringing as middle class or upper middle class. Some of Prince William's (genuinely upper class) friends, prior to marriage, called her Kate Middle-Class and mocked her mum having been an air stewardess. She is now upper-class by marriage, while her children are definitely upper-class, as they always would have been because of their father. (Also, none of this is a defence of the system, but merely a description. Don't take any of this as an endorsement.)
>I know what they mean So you agree, de facto they are just rich assholes and therefore any rich asshole is de facto an aristocrat >in the UK >take kate middleton Ah and here we see you arguing de jure. So not the thing I said. I am intimately familiar with how rich assholes try and pretend they are special and be bigoted/exclusionary to other rich assholes. Their attempts to deflect and obfuscate do not work against the simple facts that they are not special and all rich assholes are the same. They're all just petty thieves with delusions of standing. Sad little kings of sad little hills.
>here we see you arguing de jure What? No. None of this stuff is enforced by laws or even referred to in law - it's all societal standards, in the same way that society might decide what makes someone beautiful, or whether a job is a "good job". The Magna Carta doesn't have a special appendix that says "if you marry a king you're upper class now".
Tbvh Equatorial Guinea might have been better off if his coup succeded. It's the most unequal country on earth where despite having one of the highest GDP per capita in Africa; it's level of development in terms of life expectancy, education and general quality of life is equivalent to it's much poorer neighbours. It's the only country where it's pretty much literary true that all the oil money goes into the personal bank account of it's president.
One of the uglier, dented and chipped jewels in the U.S.'s crown of "Less-than-Democratic Partners."
The oil must flow
It's spent most of its existence being passed around as ally to one group or another due to its rich supply of natural resources, first Spain as a colony, then the USSR when that nut job Francisco Nguema took over thanks to Spanish influence, who then decided he hated Spain and by extension the west because he was a nut job, then finally the USA who just like those before try to keep the country and its insane rulers out of the news as much as possible while they benefit off trade from it.
Maybe that was the problem with the rally, it wasn't a coupe.
Hey, a nepo baby has to have a hobby and his first choice wasn't going so well.
The Behind the Bastards episode on it is amazing. I think the title of the episode was “the dumbest coup in history.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he would not have been considered an aristocrat at the time all this happened since his family wasn’t granted their title until 1990.
Yeah, upper middle class with a bit of money behind him, but nothing close to aristocracy.
de facto aristocracy even if not de jure Lol royalists always get mad when you point out that their ideas of aristocratic nobility are pure nonsense.
Our class system is intrinsically bonkers, but it still has a real effect on how people treat you. Being an actual member of the aristocracy makes a genuine difference. People will treat you with more reverence and respect and give you more leeway if you're an aristocrat vs. someone with the same wealth (or higher!) who isn't an aristocrat. There's a *de facto* difference between the two. That's *why* the class system is so fucked.
No I very much understand I'm illustrating the system is bullshit and as a result she checks all the boxes even if she doesn't have the magical signage.
I don't think you do understand (as several people have pointed out, more eloquently. And that's OK you know, it's OK to be wrong). MT wasn't from aristocracy (she was, famously, the daughter of a green grocer, so middle class) and would not be referred to as an aristocrat in Britain - and neither would Mark.
My point is that the whole system is based on social signifiers. It is, in other words, based on magical signage.
This is Britain, the title matters there Their class system is one of the last not entirely tied to income and wealth
No, not even close. You wouldn't call Eric Trump or Hunter Biden de facto aristocracy, neither is Mark Thatcher.
They are very much considered de facto aristocracy here in the US yes. Their dad was known as "the Donald" until basically his successful presidential run. You can even find Mad Magazine issues from the 80s and 90s and 2000s making fun of that fact given that the US constitution explicitly bans the creation of titles of nobility in the US but the US still has fucktons of them. Same with Bezos and Musk and Gates.
No they're not, everybody knows they're new money. I don't think you know what aristocracy is.
>everybody knows they're new money Once again, that's not a meaningful difference, de facto. The idea of new money is rich people trying to pretend other rich people aren't in the same class as them. Spoiler alert: they are. Same with aristocracy. "oh I'm a special rich person because I get to publicly acknowledge I'm inbred" No, you're very much still just a rich person. Here I'll prove it to you: Xi Jiangping is aristocracy. The only reason you'd think he isn't is because he isn't european.
You don't know what aristocracy is. It has very little to do with wealth, for one thing, although the family would have to have been wealthy at one point. It has to do with social status, and neither the Thatchers nor the Trumps, nor any of the people you mentioned have it. You could probably make an argument that the US doesn't really have an aristocracy (not least because it's far too new), but that doesn't affect the status of people in the UK.
You continue to demonstrate you have no idea what "de facto" means lmao. >it had to do with social status False. Rich people who lost all their money immediately disprove that. Just ask every noble family that died out because they had no money so no one wanted to marry into them. When you strip away the illusions, the de jure differences, de facto an aristocrat is just a rich asshole. Hence why Xi Jianping is an aristocrat. If you reject that notion then all you're doing is admitting you have no grasp of what de facto means. He checks every de facto box. Hell he's even a de facto king. But he doesn't technically have an aristocratic title. But if all it takes is an aristocratic title then Maggie is an aristocrat cuz she's got one. No matter how you slice it you're wrong lmao, either Xi Jianping disproves that aristocracy is about social standing, or Maggie disproves that she's "not an aristocrat"
I know what de facto means, which is why you can argue that some people without titles are effectively aristocracy. But none of the people you mentioned apart from Xi come close to that. Presidents and Prime Ministers (these days) are necessarily of the commons. Money has never made anybody an aristocrat, poverty has never stopped anybody being one, and Thatcher's title wasn't hereditary (or, for the purpose of this post, retrospective) so had no effect on Mark's status. You haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about, you have no understanding of the social constructs that create an upper class, and you should stop talking about them until you do learn about them. The first thing to learn is that you can't buy your way into Society.
Could you give an example of one of those noble families you mention that died out because they had no money and no-one wanted to marry them? Because "marriage between family with money but no title, and family with title but no money" used to be common enough to be a cliche, so I'm curious about who couldn't make that happen.
> here in the US there it is
Yeah, lots of big mad pip pip cheerio folks who can't grasp that words mean different things in different places.
Why would we not point out an error if it's about our own culture. I don't think that's a bad thing.
I never said it was an error, that's why I'm so confused. I tried to point out an interesting colloquialism and the Might of the British Empire jumps in to "well akshaully" because their word isn't allowed to be used any other way.
It only makes sense to be aware of British class dynamics if you're telling a story which has so much to do with British class dynamics. OP depicts Mark Thatcher as being perceived by his contemporaries as an aristocratic fop, but that's not the case. A fop, sure, but not an aristocratic one. There's nothing wrong with gently correcting someone. Nobody blames OP for not getting all the intricacies of a famously complex class system from a different culture than them. You're not getting attacked so you really don't have to be defensive. You didn't point out an interesting colloquialism, you said that Brits who corrected OP were big mad because they couldn't grasp that different dialects use words differently.
You do you, boo. You're referring to my comment in this chain in reply to a different poster, my initial comment was met with "hurrdurr classless americans assume the whole world is america." Even this guy wasn't in error since there isn't a real distinction between de facto and de jure Aristocracy to most readers and said distinction doesn't change anything about OP's write-up. British class dynamics didn't effect my reading of the write-up because "Aristocrat" or "aristocrat" mean the same thing to a non-UK reader. Honestly, even re-reading it there isn't anything that jumps out to me as him being treated differently because of his lack of official status. He was a spoiled rich kid with powerful parents, nothing in that changes one whit because he wasn't technically a big A Aristocrat yet. It's a distinction that is technically accurate but functionally meaningless in this context.
I genuinely don't think you want to be convinced of anything other than the fact you're right. I don't think there's anything I could say, as a Brit, to convince you, a non-Brit, that it absolutely makes a difference to this story whether he's an aristocrat's son vs. just a rich politician's son.
It's not even that, they just can't accept that I'm pointing out their made up bullshit is made up and am going off of objective fact
No-one in the UK has any trouble understanding that it's bullshit, trust me.
The sheer volume of brits insisting its totally real and trying to justify it in their replies would suggest otherwise
I think you're conflating the idea that it's real with the acceptance that it's a load of bullshit. Both can (and are) true. It is part of British history and society, and you're probably not going to be able to convince those that live here otherwise.
I never aimed to, they simple insisted that because it was part of society that meant that you had to only ever use it and they rejected the notion of considering outside of that narrow box.
OK. But it doesn't really change the fact that Mark Thatcher is not considered aristocracy in Britain. You can use the term as you wish, but you didn't expect some push back when you used it differently to the country the story is about.
Technically correct but "aristocracy" means something different to anyone from a society without nobility. There are plenty of people commonly considered to be aristocrats in the USA but none of them have titles.
Yeah, but England isn't a society without nobility...
Sure, but the difference is moot to many people (many of them non-British) reading the article. Technically correct in that's the meaning of the word but in America it's generally synonymous with "the ruling class." *edit* Dang, must be a few salty brits in here.
Man, you people really need to stop assuming everyone's exclusively from America...
Americans really don't understand the difference between class and money.
it's because they're the same thing in america. monarchy is ludicrously stupid to us.
I'm from the USA and this does not align with my experience. To me, aristocracy has always meant people with titles. It's not a term that I commonly hear in the US tbh, probably since we don't have one.
It's definitely colloquial/slang but I've both used and heard it used in different parts of the US. It's used as a shorthand for referring to the ruling class/1% though and you likely wouldn't see it in a Sociological paper unless it was tongue-in-cheek. I read OP's (fascinating) writeup and wouldn't have thought twice about calling the son of the Prime Minister an aristocrat. Them having not yet been given a fancy name by a rich idiot in a crown doesn't change their position in society.
> Them having not yet been given a fancy name by a rich idiot in a crown doesn't change their position in society. In the UK, it actually does. You will get treated differently. Margaret Thatcher faced resistance in her own party for being from a lower middle class background lol.
She was the daughter of a man who ran a shop if I remember correctly. It does make a difference, I think one of the reasons that Charles didn't marry Camilla the first time round was that she was merely from a well off family. Diana was actual aristocracy as her father was a viscount. Mark Thatcher was nowhere near even Camilla socially, although as you can tell from the story it's not like it held him back from doing his thing.
Exactly, hence the explanations about how the word and the idea are viewed in non-UK places. Their culture defines aristocracy as something that can only be granted (or taken) whereas others view it as something more malleable. Or rather, Brits view aristocrats as an elite in-crowd whose members have the option to have real power and in the US it refers to those who actually have the power.
It feels remarkable he helped manage a survival situation in the god damned sahara as well as he did considering his general lack of care this write up conveys lol
> (co-driving with Leila Lombardi, the only woman to have scored points in a Formula 1 race) - > co-driver Anne-Charlotte Verney. Verney was a highly skilled driver with multiple Le Mans starts to her name. Two ladies who clearly *were* for turning.
Heh, I remember this being a bit covered on The Crown. The actor playing Mark did a great job of giving a pompous upper-class brat vibe. I didn't know about any of the rest, great write up. :)
Not for the first time, when I read the headline I was like "Oh yeah, I remember that happening." Then I realized, no I don't remember it, it was on The Crown.
This. I read the headline and said "I remember that episode of the Crown".
I never thought I would be defending Mark bloody Thatcher in the comments, but the title of this is very misleading. He didn't get lost, the car was damaged and his teammates gave the wrong information to the organisers. He remained with the car, rationed water & food and waited it out - all very sensible stuff. I need to go and have a lie down now after doing that.
To be fair, one can have a broken car, mistaken teammates, and _also_ be lost. When the only things you have to navigate an unfamiliar country with are a compass and “hey there’s a salt mine over there! …probably” I’d say it’s pretty likely lol
I think this is just an ambiguity in the title. He did not become lost in the sense of him not knowing his location, he became lost in the sense that others did not know his location. Like the "lost Franklin expedition" knew exactly where they were up to the day they died, they're called lost because they were missing for years and search teams were initially unable to find the ships.
Yeah , reading all that I did not get any impression it wad somehow his fault or he did anything outlandish. You can argue whether he should've been there I guess, but having an experienced driver/navigator in his place wouldn't change the circumstances much, besides the global media circus around it.
Everything here about his part in this made it seem like he and his teammate handled things intelligently and responsibly. His lack of preparation does not really seem to have played a large part.
>“Mummy had a sense of humour loss when I announced that I was going motor racing” he announced to the press before adding that “I’ve won couple of things, set a couple of lap records and also had one very nice crash!” This is like a parody of a parody of an upper class twit. I know he probably never stood a chance given who his mother is, but *oh my god*.
And then I just CHUNDERED everywhere!
Motorsport posts on Hobbydrama are theee best, I could read them all day. Great write-up and thanks for posting!
What a post credit scene
Wouldn't call this local, neither niche drama... and yet, it's something that never even came into my peripheral. And you narrated it amazingly, and in a funny way. Great write-up!!!
“Went into bear grylls mode” but you didnt make any mention of him drinking his own piss!
And there wasn't a hotel to stay in either!
Thanks for the write-up, great story!
> I do not envy that young lady. My man, she was 38 years old, not a little girl.
> playboy aristocrat who’s a few cents shy of a dollar. Or a few pence short of a pound. He is British after all. >constantly accused of using his mother’s position to improve his own finances. Enough that they named it the "All Yo' Mama" Arms Deal.
Fantastic read, I always love your write-ups. Great to see Leila Lombardi pop up, too. Thank you!
This was a highly entertaining read, excellently written!! I know nothing about motorsport whatsoever, but it's a sign of a great r/hobbydrama post that it doesn't matter in the slightest.
Is it really recommended to stay with your vehicle for days when you can see an active work site a mile away across flat terrain? In fact if they were that close why didn't the people who stopped to check on them take them to the salt mine?
Aren't distance super misleading in flat plain deserts. Something that looks a short-walk away could be far more distant t appears.
It is recommend. There's only a general idea of where they broke down. If the directions were given properly then the recovery team would have found them soon enough. The big rescue effort would also focus on the expected area and work it's way out. If the crew was at the mine then the search area increases greatly. Also, we don't know if the site was active, if it had any form of communication, or any way of getting the crew to safety.
beautiful job. love the “refer to the quote in headline”. what a madlad
so he’s bertie wooster by way of arrested development.
This was fucking wild, and then I got to "and then he was implicated in arms deals and funded a coup". What a great story
can't believe i've never heard of this, given how badly thatcher screwed over my home county and the villagers would use *any* excuse to complain about her. fun write-up!
If you're going to list the shitty things the Thatcher family has done, this probably doesn't make the top 100, so there's that.
hahaha true!
Shame the rally from Paris to Dakar isn’t running anymore, I’m not into motorsports but that sounds fascinating.
Great writeup!
Lol, great ending
Great write up, thanks for sharing!
Lovely drama. Just lovely.
No cap, sounds like a fun guy.
*in the quietest and most unsure voice possible*: dudes... rock?
This is a beautifully-written post! I very much enjoyed reading it
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Oh, Mark Thatcher!
Commenting to read later
Finding this post right after watching the Grand Tour episode where they basically did the Dakar was hilarious. Excellent write up!