The new Wonga advert: ‘its name is worse than mud'

Pity Wonga. Go on, try. Clobbered for £2.6m by the Financial Conduct Authority for sending out fake legal letters, faced with losses of £37.3m in 2014, considered so morally inferior for its exorbitant interest rates that even MPs and archbishops feel able to have a go at it, and all the while suffering the stigma of association with Newcastle United FC. Its name is worse than mud. It is Wonga.

Having ditched those baffling ads featuring latex pensioners, it’s now rebranding itself as the lender of choice for the sort of people David Cameron successfully wooed at the last election. Hence this latest ad. “What are you responsible for?” asks a sensible lady voiceover, as we meet a dinner lady, a groundsman, a housewife, an art gallery attendant and a dairy farmer. “Hard-working people just like you”, seeking credit in the “real world”. Responsible. Hardworking. Real world. All the buzzwords of Tory Britain in 2015.

Surely, though, in a recovering economy, such strivers wouldn’t need to resort to using the traditional bailer-out of the shirkers, those feckless “chavvy” types and workshy scroungers who make up the assumed customer base of this vulgarly monikered company? Is this Wonga making a play for respectability by cosying up to a posher class of person? Or are such “respectable” folk, for all their hard graft, actually increasingly likely to require payday loans to get by in today’s Conservative-manufactured “real world” of job insecurity, escalating rental and property prices and falling wages? Place your money on the latter, if you can lay your hands on any.