A different class of snob

‘Ah, beware of snobbery,’ said Cary Grant, who was surprisingly often the smartest guy in the room. ‘It is the unwelcome recognition of one’s own past failings.’

In Britain, the only place where true toffs abide and, let’s face it, the place where modern snobbery was most successfully codified, it is still a more powerful force than we like to acknowledge.

Brexit was a comedy of the thwarted snobbery of the right and left. A referendum was organised by a Remainer toff who assumed he would win because, well, he was a toff. He was, in the event, comprehensively defeated and deposed. Meanwhile, the even more fervently Remainer middle-class bien–pensants, who sincerely believed they spoke for the working classes and who said they wanted to hear their voice, turned out to be fabulously deluded when they did.

By doing the ‘wrong’ thing by the standards of their ‘superiors’, only the working classes left the stage with their dignity intact. As the curtain fell all were agreed — this one will run and run.

The toffs have now retreated to plot against Theresa May, their unexpectedly ruthless and irretrievably grammar-school nemesis. American and British middle-class bien-pensants told themselves a deliriously condescending tale about how the (unstatedly ignorant) workers had been misled by the lies of the Brexiters.

The losing half the population regarded the winning half with pity and, more often, disdain. This was a class matter: suddenly it was OK to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with people worse off than you. Snobbery was respectable again; a dangerous development.

In 2011 that hero of the new left, Owen Jones, wrote a book called Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. It made many fair points; Jones was rightly outraged by inequality and the class scorn the chav classes have endured.