The class that Brown is really speaking for

12 April 2012

The Prime Minister sneers that the Conservative tax policy was "dreamt up on the playing fields of Eton".

This is a curiously hamfisted attack, having the unintended effect of associating Conservative fiscal policy with the glorious English victory at Waterloo.

But the Prime Minister's gag-writer-grammar-school chap probably might not have known that: the point was to remind the nation that David Cameron is a poncey Etonian toff.

The weakest argument about class in politics is the idea that it's unfair if toffs get the top jobs because they've always had it easy.

Worldly, well-educated, widely travelled people are what you want in politics; and those qualities are very often to be found in those with a privileged background.

Personal ambition may drive politicians but thwarting or rewarding personal ambition is an idiotic reason for an elector to cast a vote.

The stronger point is to ask not whether Cameron's lot had an unfair head start in life but whose interests he or she will represent once elected.

Brown's class-war rhetoric is, as you'll often hear it described, outdated.

However, it's not outdated because we've arrived at a classless society. It's outdated because the relationship of electoral politics to class has changed.

In the olden days, Tory MPs came from business or the gentry and batted instinctively on behalf of land and capital.

Labour MPs, from the unions, could be expected to cleave to the interests of labour and the union movement.

The politicians now coming up aren't the political representatives of a class interest but representatives of the political class.

They don't come from the shop floor or the top table; they come from think-tanks and consultancies, political journalism and local government. They are professional politicians.

The class whose air they breathe and at whose dinner tables they eat is the political class. It is that class's interests they can be expected to serve and it is a class to which Brown belongs as much as Cameron.

As Private Eye points out, for instance, the public administration committee has recommended that in the interests of probity, ex-ministers should be prevented "for several years" from cashing in on their contacts by working as lobbyists.

Brown's government has flatly refused to put down the legislation. Spoil a nice post-parliamentary earner? They should cocoa!

There's no question David Cameron's Bullingdonian roisterers exude an unattractive sense of entitlement but is Gordon Brown really one to talk?

A sense of entitlement is what gave us his epic sulk, broken only when he was anointed Prime Minister without standing for election.

It gave us a new EU Foreign Minister in Baroness Ashton, who has never been elected to so much as team captain in a five-a-side footy.

It gave us MPs of both parties who expected child care and cleaners to be on expenses, and implied that to struggle by on roughly double the national average salary was a crime against their human rights.

A grotesque sense of entitlement is not, as it once might have been, the especial distinction of the aristocratic Tory. It is a defining characteristic of the political class itself. The rest is gas and air.

Spooked by a mobile phone

I am gripped by Spooks on the BBC. Has there ever been a TV series that kills off its principal characters so abruptly, and with such heartless abandon?

Neighbours and EastEnders used to spend months building up to a death; Spooks whacks a couple every other episode. God knows what its actors' contracts look like.

But it's not the death toll that really compromises its realism.

It's that its hunky, heavily tattooed, easily betrayed, unlikely-to-make-it-to-the-end-of-the-series-hero Lucas North uses an iPhone.

If the future of the free world rested on the reliability of your communications, would you really lock yourself into a mobile phone contract with O2?

An odd type

So farewell then, Cormac McCarthy's typewriter. The Olivetti, bought in a Tennessee pawnshop in 1963, and on which the much-admired American novelist has composed some five million words, has been sold at auction to a private collector for a quarter of a million dollars.

My main thought is: Good. Will he now invest in a typewriter where the bloody apostrophe key is working?

There's no doubt that McCarthy is a superb craftsman but his habit of spelling "don't" as "dont" and "isn't" as "isnt" always seemed intrusive and affected.

That was until I heard how old his typewriter was, and, well, I'm willing to give him another chance.

According to a report yesterday, international drug cartels now prefer to do business in euros rather than dollars.

This isn't necessarily a vote of confidence in the economy: it's that 500 euro notes make it easier to smuggle large sums in small packages.

Still, all to the good. One disapproves of drug cartels, obviously, but if they must do business, let them do it in euros. If the US starts issuing $1,000 bills, you'll know what's up.

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