Then Anti-Posh Boy Alliance

Nancy picks up from my comments of the other day on the description of Dave Cameron and his side-kick, George as "arrogant posh boys". She doesn't just take issue with "boys", but also "posh".

It is too easy to decide the Tories can't be listened to because they're posh. Until we remember that Tony Blair is probably as rich if not richer than David Cameron, or that Harriet Harman was also privately educated. The real problem with Dave and Geoerge, but also with Ed, Ed, Yvette, Harriet, Nick and all the rest is, it seems to me, that none of them have ever really done anything worthwhile. Their career trajectories, for the most part, have gone from running the bar at the OUCA garden party, to carrying bags for more senior politicos, to suddenly running the country. The old way of running the country didn't used to be that great, perhaps, but at least we knew that if the Tories were in, these were people who were used to running businesses. They recognised rubbish like the pasty tax coming from the Civil Service when  they saw it - because if they didn't they wouldn't have been successes in their real lives. Likewise John Prescott, for example, whatever his flaws, had genuinely done real jobs - knew what it really meant to have served other people. The current lot seem to have succeeded merely through having shiny faces.

So poshness is neither here nor there. The whole bunch of them are pretty well on a level for their past inexperience at doing pretty well anything, and it shows.  If Bertie Wooster were alive today instead of mere figment of the Master's imagination - he was, after all, educated at Eton and then Magdalen, Oxford; sitting there comfortably on a private income - I suspect he'd be in the House of Commons by now. I just don't know which side of the House.

But to be posh is, like being gay or Welsh or a supporter of Northampton Town Football Club, not solely a lifestyle choice. Although we can't find the posh gene, those that are born posh find it very hard to change - indeed, they are sneered at as "Mockneys" if they try to lose those fruity vowels. Wedgie Benn himself, I'm told, although prood to become the former Vicount Stairgate, nevertheless never really understood the working class when he was in government. When he had Trades Union visitors, apparently, he always served them sandwiches on the grounds that's what common people eat. While it's more-or-less impossible successfully to impersonate the posh if you're not. To my knowledge, the only people in living memory that have really achieved it have been Lady Gaga, Screaming Lord Sutch and the Barron Knights.

No, we have to learn to understand posh people. They aren't like us. If they weren't safely in the Houses of Parliament they'd be getting run down in traffic or gazing into puddles wondering who the person is gazing back out at them. I'm not saying they'll ever truly be part of mainstream society - their communication problems alone prevent that, communicating only by a kind of braying noise - but as long as they can be kept in one place, with the Civil Service to prevent them from ever truly having power, they can at least be contained.