The Common Touch

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, has taken exception to some unpleasantries by the Glorious Successor and Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring about the public-school background of some of the twits, flits and shits in the shadow cabinet. Daveybloke said that he was "not in the slightest bit embarrassed" about his private schooling: "frankly I think the country is more interested in who are these people, are they any good, have they got the right ideas, will they take the country forward, have they got the energy and vigour and dynamism that we so badly need?" Well, leaving the matter of ideas in charitable abeyance, Daveybloke has about as much vigour and dynamism as is required to work as an office boy for a relative before being made leader of the notoriously meritocratic Conservative Party on the strength of looking a bit less shop-soiled than David Davis or Kenneth Clarke, and also thanks to a certain cast-iron guarantee about which it would perhaps be tactless to go into detail. Besides, there are people in Daveybloke's shadow cabinet who did not have a private education - such towers of probity as William Hague, such men of the people as Eric Pickles, such paragons of barking sanity as Liam Fox. No doubt some of them are good with the coloured folks, too. Certainly the ill-natured gibes from New New Labour must be motivated entirely by envy and resentment; for if Gordon had been blessed with Daveybloke's social connections he might not have had to work so hard to persuade the rich and influential that New New Labour rated their interests so far above the interests of everyone else.