Toby Young Toby Young

Different class

The leaders of the coalition may look like aristocrats, but they think they are meritocrats. Don’t count on noblesse oblige

Two years ago, I put together a proposal for a book about the coming sea change in British politics. It was going to document the resurgence of a political clique that, until recently, had been written off as a busted flush. How had David Cameron, the grandson of a baronet and a member of the Bullingdon Club, managed to overcome the anti-toff prejudice that had put paid to Douglas Hurd’s leadership bid 18 years earlier? The idea was for publication to coincide with the Conservatives thunderous election victory of 2010. I was going to call it The Return of the Eton Mob.

I never got around to writing it, which is probably just as well. This analysis now seems completely wrong-headed — and not only because the Tories failed to win a majority. The resemblance between David Cameron and the 18 other Old Etonians who occupied No. 10 Downing Street is purely superficial. He may have a genetic link to the handful of aristocratic families from which England’s political elite used to be drawn, but there’s nothing of the gentleman amateur about him. On the contrary, Cameron is a professional — the only class with a claim on his loyalties is the political class.

Cameron’s first job out of university was for the Conservative Research Department and from there he went on to become a special adviser to Norman Lamont and Michael Howard. It’s a career path mirrored by the leader of the opposition, and the Prime Minister has more in common with Labour’s ‘new generation’ than he does with the grouse moor Tories of the 1950s and 1960s. Cameron is the heir to Blair, not Macmillan.

The lack of high Tory DNA in the present government has little to do with the fact that the Conservatives have been forced to share power with the Lib Dems.

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