Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an "-ism .The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom odd, since as a prim, upwardly mobile striver, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism.
In a speech delivered at the Tory party conference in October, the chancellor painted a sympathetic portrait of a fictive blue-collar striver, rising early for work only to see the drawn curtains of his neighbour, "sleeping off a life on benefits".
Writing on the ConservativeHome website, Mr Clark said there is nothing wrong with being a "striver" but argued that not everyone wants to be one.
"Not being a striver doesn't make you a shirker – it's simply a matter of working to live, not living to work".
Perhaps the black-and-white also brings out a submerged nostalgia for the likes of Frances, who as an impecunious striver is surely a dying breed.
"Uprooted and anxious", Hoggart's worried striver labours to conform, to pacify, to please.
By virtue of her very ordinary origins – the much-mocked grocer's daughter – and the fact of being a woman in what was even more of a man's world than it is now, she could not but be a striver and an outsider.
Just when it seemed that the young striver had finally crawled his way to Success, he nearly sank into Ruin: Lincoln grew a beard, making Bradley's inventory worthless.
Beaton, an inveterate dandy, social striver, and occasionally merciless diarist, was a great chronicler of society and celebrity not only because of his devotion to the social scenes he inhabited but because of his passion for his individual subjects and his commitment to capturing their charisma on film.
("Of course we're fighting: we're a Tiger Family!") Similarly, a certain humble-braggadocio — "I know I'm messed up, but I guess that's just the price of being a striver!" — can make us more willing to enjoy the company of difficult people.
Like the Tom Perrotta novel it was based on, Payne's film offered unexpected moments of sympathy for Witherspoon's fastidious striver — a sense of how lonely her perfectionism leaves her.
