In the wee small hours of this morning, Barack Obama stood in Iowa, scene of his first great triumph in this year’s marathon Democratic contest, and claim a near-as-victory. With a win in Oregon offsetting the defeat in Kentucky, Obama’s aides reckoned that this morning would bring a majority of the pledged delegates that determine the party’s nominee. His presence back in the mainly white state that first anointed him, buoyed by the votes of heavily white Oregon, would reinforce the message that rang out when he won Iowa on Jan. 3. “They said this day would never come,” Obama declared then, in what was widely heard as a proclamation that America had at last begun to transcend its most vexed question: race.
An equivalent, if rather less epic moment, could come in Nantwich Civic Hall. Edward Timpson, the millionaire son of the Timpson shoe-repair dynasty — whose fortune is in excess of £53m, according to his opponents — is expected to seize Crewe and Nantwich. Imagine it: a heartland Labour seat, once home to locomotive engineers and railway firemen, not only falling to the Tories (becoming their first byelection gain from Labour in 30 years) but to a mansion-dwelling posh boy. Truly the words would ring out from Crewe and across these islands: “They said this day would never come.”
When the well-born suddenly find new doors opening to them, it is not quite the transcending of class the way Americans imagine Obama to be transcending race. The child of a single mother, raised on a council estate, becoming the leader of the Conservative party: now that would be more like it — but the Tories missed that chance when they passed over David Davis for David Cameron in 2005. Class has been a factor in the byelection campaign, with Labour hounding Timpson for his silver-spoon upbringing, dispatching volunteers to the constituency in top hats and tails. And class has become a factor in our national politics, with Labour proving that it has, as yet, no idea how to handle it.
At least the Tories clearly understand their vulnerability in this area. Note their forceful efforts to have a Labour flier, featuring a mocked-up photo of Timpson in a topper, suppressed. Note their more serious, and successful, campaign to have that now legendary — genuine and undoctored — photograph of the Bullingdon Club circa 1986, featuring Cameron and Boris Johnson in full regalia, withdrawn from circulation. (Luckily for them, newspapers have complied with this edict, even though the image is just a Google away.) These are pretty strenuous exertions for a party that says it’s relaxed about background, insisting that it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s where you’re going that counts. As Stefan Stern wrote in the Financial Times last week: “If David Cameron is so proud of the ‘great school’ he attended — it was Eton, by the way — why does he never mention it by name in public?”
The Tories may well be antsy around the whole subject, but their Labour opponents are hardly giving them much reason to worry. Each time they hint at class, they blow it. The Crewe campaign has backfired — thanks also to a nasty, xenophobic attack on the town’s large community of foreign, especially Polish, workers — bringing sharp criticism from ministerial quarters. In London, Ken Livingstone’s effort to paint Johnson as a puffed-up public school boy made little headway. And Gordon Brown has tended to steer clear ever since he directed an “old Etonian” gag at Cameron during the 2005 Labour party conference, a joke that died a death even before that sympathetic audience.
Its failure was revealing. It suggested that a snide remark on class can boomerang back to strike the attacker. Brown sounded envious, as if he had a chip on his shoulder. There is a risk, too, of “four Yorkshiremen” style inverted snobbery, as if bragging about one’s own hard-luck roots. To say nothing of the danger that in the early 21st century banging on about class makes the speaker look vaguely retro, evoking a cloth cap v Gosford Park era of social division that has all but vanished.
There is a specific peril for the New Labour brand. Seeking to be the party of aspiration, its rhetoric has held that a person’s start in life should not determine their fate. If that is true of the inner-city child, why can’t it be true of Edward Timpson? Labour has another reason to be wary. On Radio 4 the always shrewd historian David Kynaston mused on the “officer quality” that Cameron seems to exude. That phrase brought to the surface something I have suspected since Cameron first sought his party’s leadership. For all John Major’s promises of a classless society, and Tony Blair’s declarations in 1999 that “The class war is over”, is it not possible that there lurks still, deep within the DNA of this society, a deference to those who were born to rule? There was a hint of that in Johnson’s campaign trips to traditional white, working-class areas of London. Watch him with the butchers of Smithfield meat market or with the drivers of black cabs, and it could have been a royal visit to the Blitzed East End: all that was missing were the doffed caps and declarations that “You’re a gentleman, sir, and make no mistake”.
Older canvassers recall voters saying they wanted the Tories to run the economy because they were rich and knew how to handle money. My Guardian colleague David McKie remembers an earlier generation of working-class Tories arguing that, if ever the national coffers were too bare, the Conservatives would dip into their own pockets to bail the country out. We might laugh at that now, but the ready acceptance of Captain Cameron — with the able NCO David Davis at his side — suggests that that view of the upper-class Conservative as Britain’s natural ruling elite has not entirely vanished. Others in the Labour circle offer rather more straightforward reasons to avoid class. One former Downing Street official said that the top hats in Crewe looked like a desperate admission by Labour: we can’t argue with the Conservatives on substance, so we’ll go after them on symbols. What’s more, he argued, the character — including the class profile — of a politician matters only when that politician is unpopular for other reasons. Major was always boring, he says; but no one cared about that in 1992. Gordon Brown’s earnest dourness was seen as an asset a year ago; now it’s reviled. Same with Cameron’s poshness. Until he becomes disliked on other grounds, it won’t register.
The frustration here is that class could work for Labour. First the party would have to acknowledge the woeful fact that social mobility has slowed since 1997. Next it would have to vow to turn that round, pursuing the goal of true meritocracy. Only then could it begin to put the Tories on the defensive, asking what tangible steps they advocated to make Britain a more fluid society. Finally, Labour could wonder at the Tory ability to be in touch with regular Britons’ every day problems, when its frontbench team recently included no fewer than 14 old Etonians (with three more in Cameron’s private office).
Strategy first, tactics later. Labour can put David Cameron in top hat and tails — but much, much more important to show voters what he’s like underneath.
