Nec Temere, Nec Timide

Since neither will ever be good enough for the likes of Andrew Rawnsley. He and his take it as a personal affront that there is a Prime Minister who holds degrees but not from Oxbridge (among those other than Rawnsley, and particularly in the BBC, not from Oxford specifically). A non-graduate they could and do almost tolerate, albeit only as an occasional curiosity rather than with any hope of being treated as a serious figure. But a non-Oxbridge graduate is beyond the pale.

Nor can they stand the fact that Gordon Brown makes no attempt to hide his Scottishness. David Cameron is an archetypal posh Scot, but that is usually enough to pass someone off as English among the English. Tony Blair built a whole career on pretending to be Southern without ever quite saying something so absurd on the part of a man more Scots-Irish than anything else, born in Edinburgh, and educated there and in Durham before Oxford, after which he was back as a County Durham MP, and married to a Liverpudlian, by the time that he was 30. His house in Trimdon Village, about five miles outside Durham, has not been sold, so there seems little doubt as to where he will retire, where he will die, and where he will be buried.

But he made enough of an effort that the Andrew Rawnsleys of the world were prepared to avert their eyes to the necessary extent. A fat lot of good the supposed roots of New Labour in the North East ever did us, but we are our own worst enemies, uniquely putting that party at the top of the European poll last year, unlike even the Welsh. And now the media have David Cameron, anyway: the figure whom Blair was pretending to be.

Not that Brown has effected enough of a break. If Rawnsley's mates in the City are entitled to State aid, then how come Teesside steelworkers who paid for it are not, especially since such aid, allegedly illegal under EU law, is routine to the point of being unremarkable in every other member-state? Nor has any of those states ever heard of the supposed ban on the trains and the track being in the same ownership, including the trains and the track in Rawnsleyland, where they have rather a lot of both, being permitted to retain the sort of network not enjoyed by the rest of us since the Sixties, though of course at the expense of the rest of us, not least the Teesside steelworkers.

Those workers, please note, largely inhabit Labour-Tory marginal seats. Except that you are only one of those if the media say that you are. And they deny outright the existence of such things in the North, every inch of which is classified as "the Labour heartlands" in order to avoid having to report us. But, whether Rawnsley and his kind like it or not, it is thanks to those workers that there is a Labour Government at all. They have certainly not always voted Labour, but they did on the last three occasions. Rawnsleyland, by contrast, voted very heavily for the losing party in 2005. Yet its view matters, while that of the people who backed the right horse does not. Both horses, all three horses, belong in the knacker's yard. As does Andrew Rawnsley.