Sometimes, It Takes A Tory

I mean of course a proper Tory, such as Geoffrey Wheatcroft:

Compare our rulers with Labour's one great, radical reforming government in 1945-51, under the public school, Oxonian, infantry officer CR Attlee. He had three chancellors, an Etonian and two Wykehamists. But nobody minded where Dalton, Cripps and Gaitskell went to school. They were socialists who believed they were building a new society in the interests of the poor.

What has now happened is that toff-bashing has become a displacement activity for a Labour party that has lost its popular roots and its radical faith. This is sham class war, a substitute for grownup politics, and the voters have noticed. In Crewe, Labour supporters passed by those stupid posters and voted Tory, and in London the white working class also voted Tory. It might be that we live in a new age of deference and that cheery Cockneys were so overawed by pictures of Johnson in his Bullingdon kit that the they doffed their cloth caps to him. Or it might just be that they are fed up with Labour.

On Friday evening, Channel 4 News interviewed Mark Fisher, who sits for the constituency next to Crewe. He is an independent spirit among Labour MPs, and has a semi-detached relationship with the ruling junta as a result. After all the clammy evasions we had heard from ministers throughout the day, he provided a cold shower of candour. This wasn't a temporary setback or mid-term blues, Fisher said, it was a brutal verdict on the government. Labour's only hope was to rediscover its role as a party of public services and reconnect with its origins as the champion of the poor.

True Labour supporters, or such as remain, will doubtless have given a silent cheer. I wonder how many of them remembered that Fisher went to the same school as Cameron and Johnson. "Floreat Etona" may seem an improbable slogan for a Labour revival, but the government really must do better than "Yah boo sucks to the toffs".