The last time an Old Etonian got to head a major British political party, the Beatles had only just released their second single. Back in 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home ‘emerged’ as a non-elected prime minister, after not being elected to head the Conservative Party.
The voters didn’t get any say on this one, and nor did the hapless Tory backbenchers, for that matter. It would have been a damned impertinence to subject Baron Home of the Hirsel, fourteenth Earl of Home, to that kind of inconvenience.
Instead, a handful of leading Conservative figures selected Sir Alec for the job, by a process only paralleled by the mechanisms for choosing a new Pope.
They say Sir Alec was a good chap and a jolly nice fellow and all that. But as a paid-up, grouse-shooting, not particularly bright member of the upper class, he was very obviously out of touch with ordinary voters. Labour was quick to realise that, and leader of the opposition Harold Wilson hammered home the point. Repeatedly.
A year later, Wilson was in Number Ten. The Tories had been ousted from office after 13 years, with class politics one of the major reasons. From then on, the Tories were determined to broaden their appeal.
Home’s replacement, Edward Heath, became the first grammar school boy to lead the Conservatives. Later, things got more plebeian even than that, with the job later going to a petit bourgeois grocer’s daughter from Grantham, the son of a garden ornament manufacturer who went bust, and even a kid from a comp in Rotherham.
Until now, that is. As if to illustrate the statistical tendency of reversion to the mean, the Old Etonians are back in charge of the Tories. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an OE with deep family roots in the ruling classes of several nations, has just been elected mayor of London.
Meanwhile, the party is headed by David Cameron, offspring of a stockbroker and the daughter of a Baronet, making him fifth cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. He is thought to be worth £30m.
Labour has historically been the party that represents the majority of society against the elite, so all this should present it with an open goal. I mean, Wilson was nobody’s idea of a prole, but he was still able effectively to highlight what the Tories are and who they represent.
But you can bet on one thing. Labour today - ‘ideologically neutral’ New Labour, with its schoolgirl crush on the super-rich - won’t try anything of the sort. That would smack of class politics, and we can’t be having any of that, can we? Not even if the other side are most insistent on its reintroduction.
This article first appeared as a guest post on Drink Soaked Trots. I am recycling it as I am too flat-out busy to post something new today. But watch out for some reflections on Crewe & Nantwich over the bank holiday weekend, plus a possibly controversial guest post from one of the Left List's media advisers.
Comments (3)
Admittedly Home got that job because Macmillan wanted to shaft Rab Butler but you don't get to be Foreign Secretary by not being very bright.
In any event, Home only lost by a whisker and Heath got thumped in 1966. Which suggests that all that stuff about the fourteenth Earl of Home was probably over rated.
I'm pretty sure that Labour have been led by a graduate of the Independent Sector in recent years and the heir to the Viscounty of Stansgate serves in the current administration so I'm not sure that they are in a commanding position on the whole Prolier-than-thou front.
Seeing the Tory-boys and girls on the television is vomit-inducing. They really are stereotypes. But what has Labour to offer back? Cliched managers and lawyers. Neither are attractive to the average working-class person. Anyway, labour crossed the Rubicon when it got rid of Clause 4. (Am I being too sour?).
So what? It's a lot more in the class interests of working people that a diffident "toff", if you must have it like that, is in charge of any potential Tory Government, having a patrician attitude towards poverty, than some poxy selfish middle-class (a certain woman springs to mind) w****r who has no respect and no care towards anyone who isn't part of his or her own boring white heterosexual bourgeois pass-the-peas-Mildred polish-the-car-on-Sundays 2.4 children "respectable" hypocritical world - that includes the upper and the working class.
Labour should welcome the third cousins twice removed of baronets or the Queen or whatever the hell Cameron may be. It's estate agents out for themselves that worry me.