Skepticlawyer

A couple of my tutors here have made the point that – contra the situation in the US, where race is central – if there is something festering and smelly in England, class will be at the bottom of it. The evidence, in Oxford as elsewhere, is hiding in plain sight: the hundreds of years old Town v Gown fight, to take only one example.

That said, since Thatcher detached British entrepreneurship from class origins, allowing something of a meritocracy to develop, the spectacle of class entering British politics in anything but a muted form seemed remote. Until the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, to be held this week, that is. The Labour Party has made much of Conservative candidate Edward Timpson’s wealthy background. There’s been street theatre troupes following him around the electorate dressed in top hats and tails, he’s been accused of farming llamas as a tax dodge (it turned out that the llamas belonged to someone else), along with sundry other class-based nasties.

What makes the irony particularly rich is that the Labor candidate, Tamsin Dunwoody, is the former member’s daughter (Gwyneth Dunwoody’s death led to the by-election). She doesn’t live in the electorate, and has been ‘parachuted in’ by Labour’s highly centralized party bureaucracy. The spectacle is rather comical, and saner members of New Labour have come to realise that the whole sorry episode is damaging their brand. Here is one New Labour powerbroker holding forth in the Guardian:

Labour’s high-risk tactic of portraying the Tory candidate in the Crewe and Nantwich byelection as a ‘toff’ should not be repeated in the next general election, the party’s vice-chairman said today.

Former minister Stephen Ladyman said that although the attack contained a legitimate message in highlighting Edward Timpson’s wealthy background, in future the party should be ‘a lot more clever and sharper’ in its campaigning.

The Tories said the tactic had backfired on Labour while Timpson himself, the son of the multimillionaire shoe-repair family, said it had made him more determined to put forward a more positive message.

Labour’s ‘class war’ campaign has already caused controversy, with Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, criticising the move. And an ICM poll in Crewe and Nantwich for the News of the World showed that the Tories had doubled their lead in the constituency to 45%, with Labour on 37%.

Whoops.

Ironic, too, that Timpson is no aristocrat, but the son of a self-made industrialist. It’s almost as though New Labour has forgotten the meaning of ‘inherited privilege’. Hint: it involves titles, Oxbridge and refraining from soiling one’s hands with mere ‘trade’. Timpson has none of these characteristics – for f*ck’s sake, he even went to Durham.

Others have been less coy, firing off rockets from Labour’s left:

The Labour campaign, under the command of the Birmingham MP Steve McCabe, has rebranded its chief adversary ‘Tory Boy Timpson’, and is going for him with an eye-popping ferocity. Volunteers have been stalking him dressed in top hat and tails; now, there comes a very nasty leaflet titled ‘Tory candidate application form’, replete with questions and ticked boxes. Number one is, ‘Do you live in a big mansion house?’ Question two is – and, really, the sense of humour on display is quite something – ‘Do you think that regeneration is adding a new wing to your mansion?’ The third reads: ‘Have you and your Tory mates on the council been soft on yobs and failed to make our streets safer?’ But the best is saved for question four, at which point pantomimic class hatred is suspended and we get something altogether more sinister. ‘Do you,’ it asks, ‘oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?’

The reference to the ID card issue represents one of the last vestiges of Thatcherite classical liberalism left in David Cameron’s Conservative Party, and is a point of genuine principle.

The by-election is crucial: Labour hold a comfortable majority, but that depends on the presence of a popular local candidate, not a blow-in who happens to share the same surname. Should the Conservatives win in Crewe, it will be the first Conservative by-election theft from Labour in 30 years, and will almost certainly signal the end of Gordon Brown’s hopes for re-election. It may even see the leadership knives out before the election.

Matthew D’Ancona is an old-style High Tory, once a Prize Fellow at All Souls, but even so, this comment on Labour’s classist campaign is very telling:

This is feebly reminiscent of Wilson mocking Alec Douglas-Home as the 14th Earl of Home – a tactic that was contentious even in 1964. In 2008, it smacks of desperation. If the electorate’s acceptance of Mr Cameron and his fellow Etonian Boris Johnson has one clear lesson, it is that voters are no longer consumed by class envy. Indeed, given a choice between misfiring Labour robots and spirited Etonians, they seem to prefer the latter.

UPDATE: Timpson won handily – news via Tim Blair.