The picture shows a man in evening dress, cropped so that his head isn’t visible, clutching a cigar that Freudians would surely regard as overcompensation for threatened masculinity. The caption reads: Cameron’s cronies cashing in on the credit crunch.

As sophisticated political attack ads go, the full page offerings Britain’s biggest trade union has placed in the Guardian and Daily Mirror are not exactly right up there with the finer efforts of Saatchi & Saatchi. But the message is as plain as the alliteration:

The hedge funds and short sellers who have made £millions from the destruction of Northern Rock, HBOS and Bradford and Bingley, bank roll the Conservative party.

DAVID CAMERON: CHEESY AND SLEAZY.

Now, all of this is true, and Unite are absolutely justified in feeling anger at this situation. Michael Hintze of CQS and Paul Ruddock of Lansdowne Partners both made killings shorting B&B and HBOS; Hintze has given £650,000 to the Tories since Cameron became leader, while Ruddock has donated £259,000.

Catherine Lagrange - wife of Pierre Lagrange, boss of the firm GLG Partners, which also shorted B&B - gave another £50,000. That kind of money pays for plenty of Montecristo number fours.

To make this point, the union has organised a protest outside the Conservative Party conference today, as Cameron prepares to deliver his leader’s speech, which will feature activists dressed up in pig masks and bowler hats.

You can read the rationale for the campaign in full here, by the way. Joint general secretary Derek Simpson argues:

The culture of the city is the culture of the Tories. They went to school with the city, they dine with the city and many of them married into the city. You can't rely on them to regulate the city.

Again, he’s right. But the problem for Labour-affiliated Unite is that every charge they aim at the Conservatives applies with almost equal force to New Labour.

As Unite knows full well, one of the other directors of GLG Partners is Paul Myners, who is politically close to Gordon Brown. Jon Aisbitt - a £1m donor to New Labour - is non-executive chairman of Man Group, another outfit that has done very nicely thank you out of the credit crunch. Sir Ronald Cohen, who has given over £2m, has just launched a new hedge fund.

Plenty of Labour leaders went to public schools too. Some of them send their children to such institutions. Labour has been dining with City chiefs since the prawn cocktail offensive. Gordon Brown’s director of government relations Sue Nye is married to Gavyn Davis, the former Goldman Sachs banker that Blair made chairman of the BBC.

The simple reality is that New Labour long ago abandoned the Labour Party’s traditional project of acting as the political wing of the labour movement and since 1997 has consistently governed with the interests of ‘the hedge funds and short sellers’ that the Unite ads disparage. The likes of Peter Mandelson and John Hutton are just as much at home in that culture as anybody on the Conservative front bench.

The only way to make sure the interests of working class people get much of a look in is to restore some elementary concept of working class political representation to British politics.

Both Simpson and his fellow joint general secretary Tony Woodley - read an insider’s account of the tensions between them here - are sufficiently savvy to know that. They are also positioned to do something about it.