At the Conservative Home Victory 2015 conference today, a panel was asked: how can the Tories avoid being seen as a party of the posh? ‘Well, a lot of you are pretty posh,’ replied the journalist Anne McElvoy. ‘Open a cupboard in No10 and an Old Etonian falls out.’ The success of Boris, of course, shows that class isn’t necessarily a handicap. The issue is whether voters believe that a party, or its leadership, shares their values. So what to do? The conference held a session on this theme later chaired by Peter Hoskin, late of this parish. Here’s a summary.
Philip Davies, MP for Shipley and a former Spectator backbencher of the year, read a quote from Lord Ashcroft’s research. It was from a woman whose 16-year-old daughter had come home from school asking why she hadn’t been given a free computer, as her classmates had.
‘I told her it was because we work hard and pay our bills…We would not have qualified for EMA but I could not afford to give my kids £40 a week, it would have been a real strain on our finances.
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