When David Cameron became leader in December 2005, Labour strategists hoped desperately that class would become an issue once more in British politics. Their hopes were dashed, however, by the public’s apparent decision to buy Dave’s mantra: “It’s not where you come from, it’s where you are going.” The playing of the “toff” card in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election backfired spectacularly, as have Gordon Brown’s intermittent attempts to present Cameron and Osborne as “public school bullies.”
But there have always been nuances to this. Very senior Cameroons have expressed fears to me over the past three years that class could indeed return to haunt the Conservative Party if its senior figures did not watch their behaviour. They understood – or appeared to – that the voters were not giving them a green light to behave like characters from Brideshead Revisited, Antic Hay or Crome Yellow. The truce in the class war, so to speak, was conditional. Hence the amount of time and effort expended on making Cameron seem like a regular family man, on holiday at the seaside, a keen gardener, a bloke with an iPod.
So do not underestimate the contaminating impact of those ghastly Bullingdon photos reprinted yet again in today’s papers. Nobody much cares what a politician does when he is at school or university: most schoolboys and students are prats, by definition. But when the old school tie or the university toffs’ club starts to be relevant to the contemporary political scene – as it has in the spectacular falling out between George Osborne and Nat Rothschild – then alarm bells ought to go off. Nobody wants to be governed by a clique of rich kids at war with one another. I am a big fan of Osborne and I hope fervently that he rides this out. But there is a terrible warning in this episode for all the pukka Cameroons which they ignore at their peril.
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