These images only have an effect if they reinforce a previous stereotype. And for Hayward, unfortunately, it enforced the stereotype of [the] upper-crusty Englishman who says ‘I want to get my life back’ when people are suffering.

Thus Charles Krauthammer. Anyone who shares that stereotype — and to be fair to Charles K., it’s not clear from his wording that he does — needs to sit through My Fair Lady one more time. Hayward “upper-crusty”? Listen to the guy, for Pete’s sake. He’s a lower-lower-middle-class oik, same as yours truly here. See this profile in the Independent:

To be sure, Anthony Hayward is no aristocrat, as those with a sharper ear than the Florida oceanographer’s will have heard. When the 52-year-old does speak on camera, his accent reveals modest roots. Born in Slough in 1957, he was raised outside Reading, the eldest of seven children. He went to a state grammar school before reading geology at Birmingham University and doing a PhD at Edinburgh.

If it’s toffs you’re wanting, I commend to you our own Andrew Stuttaford, who knew a fish fork from a salad fork before he was out of nappies. (That’s “diapers” to you colonials.)