Tonight:
2°c
Top hats off to Annunziata Rees-Mogg, the 30-year-old Tory candidate for Somerset and Frome, who resisted David Cameron's request that she instead call herself “Nancy Mogg”.
The Conservative leader is evidently concerned about the class connotations of Ms Rees-Mogg's unusual Christian name and double-barrelled surname. And, in a constituency where the Lib Dems are defending a tiny majority of 812, it is true that every vote counts. But Ms Rees-Mogg was right to stand her ground. “Nancy Mogg” would have made her sound like a cat detective from a children's book. And, in any case, a person's name should be sacred, part of their self-definition and inviolable identity.
Yesterday, Conservative Central Office sources laughed off the story, suggesting that Cameron had only been joking. That is not my understanding of what happened: I am told that the Tory leader was, at the very least, semi-serious when he proposed the name change. Indeed, there is a growing anxiety in the upper tier of the party that class and “poshness” may still be a problem for the Tories at the election — and even more so once they are installed in office.
The disclosure yesterday that Zac Goldsmith, the candidate for Richmond Park, claims non-domicile tax status has further jangled the nerves of some Tory strategists. Mr Goldsmith, one of Mr Cameron's advisers on environmental policy, plans to relinquish the advantages of being a non-dom in due course. But, according to one senior Cameroon, “the damage is already done. Zac was simultaneously calling for tax rises on gas guzzlers and air travel while benefiting from tax breaks for the rich. Not good.”
It is orthodox now to claim that class and background no longer matter very much in British politics. And there is much truth in this. During the 2005 Tory leadership race, it was routinely argued that, whatever Mr Cameron's strengths might be, the party would not pick another Etonian leader, and that the voters would never elect a 19th Prime Minister from that school. Not so, as it turned out. During the contest, Mr Cameron presented himself not as a son of privilege but as a champion of aspiration: his mantra was that “what actually matters in politics is not where you've come from but where we're all going to.”
The opinion polls suggested that the vast majority of voters were unconcerned by Mr Cameron's schooling and wanted only to know what he stood for as a prospective PM. In May last year, the Crewe and Nantwich by-election seemed to mark the death of class-based politics: Labour's efforts to present the Tory candidate, Edward Timpson, as a “toff” looked crass and were probably counter-productive. Mr Timpson overturned Labour's 2005 majority of 7,078 to capture the seat for the Conservatives with a 17.6 per cent swing.
Mr Cameron's rebuffed request to Ms Rees-Mogg, however, suggests that he is not convinced. And while I think she was right to decline — the voters aren't stupid and would have been insulted by such a gimmick — I think the Tory leader's concerns about class politics making a comeback are not unfounded. He was powerfully, and correctly, aware of the dangers for the Conservatives inherent in the expenses scandal: the duck houses, moat-cleaning and servicing of Aga stoves risked undoing four years of re-branding work of the party as a mainstream movement. Mr Cameron was unyieldingly severe in his handling of the expenses saga because anything else would have been politically suicidal.
What the Marxist historian EP Thompson called “class-consciousness” in his legendary book, The Making of the English Working Class, is long gone. What survives, however, is a much subtler stratification and — most alarmingly — a decline in social mobility. In times of austerity, resentment of privilege naturally grows. And it is not confined to the indigent. A very wealthy entrepreneur told me recently that he was wondering if he could vote Conservative because of the party's decision to stick with Labour's 50p income tax rate. His point was that Messrs Cameron and Osborne had been born into wealth, rather than created it, and that their proposals to cut inheritance tax showed where their true priorities lay.
Thanks to the expenses scandal, more than 110 MPs are retiring at the next election. There will be a strong anti-incumbency, anti-politics vote, with the likely consequence that the next Parliament will look very different indeed. At least a third of new MPs will have been to fee-paying schools, compared with only 13 per cent of new arrivals when New Labour was first elected in 1997. There is (justified) concern among senior Tories that the A-list fast-track for candidates has increased the number of women and people from ethnic minorities standing as Tories, but done too little to change the likely socio-economic background of the new parliamentary party.
This will make the Cameron Project all the more difficult to enact. That project will almost certainly involve both tax rises and spending cuts: austerity measures that will hurt everyone, and be intrinsically hard to sell to a public longing for better times and sunny optimism after the Brown years. The voters will want to be persuaded that the new governing party is sharing their pain, and is not just a club of
Bullingdon boys playing at running the country.
Today's gilded young leader can easily become tomorrow's despised toff. A new and gilded elite can fast become a loathed oligarchy. Class politics isn't dead. In one sense, as Mr Cameron grasps, it's only getting started.
Reader views (3)
David Short - as you seem to live in N. Africa why worry? We don't want your vote since you choose not to live in your own country. As for your inverted snobbery - I would rather have a properly educated, civilised "rich by birth" MP than an ignorant chav who has fought their way up by tooth or nail. Not how I want my politicians to be.
- Jentry, London UK, 01/12/2009 06:24
Report abuse
If we are not very careful parliament will become for the privalaged few.
Sort out salary and expenses now. I've no problem with paying P.M 250,000 a year and incremental adjustments for all other M.P's, ministers etc etc but no more outside interests while sitting as an MP.
Rather feel as a L.D that the Tories have shot themselves in the foot on this one.
- Tony, Hove England, 30/11/2009 16:55
Report abuse
I could never vote for any of these rich-by-birth public school .
- David Short, Tunis, Tunisia, 30/11/2009 15:17
Report abuse
