British blood brothers

Michael Portillo has the same amount of British blood as the embodiment of tweediness, Stephen Fry

Think of your quintessential Englishman, and who comes to mind? Stephen Fry, in his Jeeves incarnation: urbane, inscrutable, and self-possessed? Or Michael Portillo: brooding, ambitious and self-analytical?

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I hear you thinking. After all, as Baroness Thatcher claimed of Portillo last week: “He’s Spanish; that’s his trouble.” Look at that arrogance, those flashing eyes, that inky hair. Surely you don’t become Prime Minister with a name like Portillo?

Yet Michael Portillo has exactly the same amount of British blood as that embodiment of tweediness, Stephen Fry. It’s just that Portillo’s father is Spanish, while Fry’s mother is Austrian. Had it been the other way round, Portillo would be called Michael Blyth, and Fry would be known as Stephen Neumann.

How would we have reacted then? Would we have described the curl of the Portillo lip as a sign of Celtic disdain? Would we have interpreted Fry’s wit and intelligence as proof of his Viennese Jewish origin? How would the enemies of the Shadow Chancellor have coped without the chance to pronounce his name “Porteeyo” with a rolled “r” and a xenophobic relish? It doesn’t work with “Blyth”.

I have to declare a certain interest in this since I, like Stephen Fry, have one Austrian and one British parent. Like Portillo, though, it was my father who was foreign. In fact, for reasons too long to relate, he should have been called “Alexander”, which was his father’s surname, rather than “Sieghart”, which was his mother’s. I used to wonder, as a child, whether life would have been different had my surname been Alexander, or Howard, my mother’s family name. For in Britain, a continental European surname hangs very visibly around your neck. I would guess this to be slightly more of a problem in the Conservative than the Labour Party. I don’t suppose, for instance, that Giles Radice has ever felt particularly unwelcome on account of his Italian surname. But in a party whose leader tries to make our flesh creep by raising the prospect of Britain becoming a “foreign land”, a name like Portillo could be a serious handicap.