How aristocratic snobbery wrecked the UK

Michael Gove, Sarah Vine and the fury of the left-behind middle class

Image by Mike Finn. Flickr creative commons

Never underestimate the power of class hatred. And never think that class divisions are only between rich and poor. The tensions between old money and new, the loaded and the merely wealthy, the grammar schoolboys and the private schoolboys rip through the right.

Conservative class hatreds can be far more potent than anything the left can produce. You see them in right-wing rage against their own elites, who don’t understand how much money means to people who don’t have enough of it.

The resentments of the middle-class right helped deliver Brexit and destroy the once mighty Conservative party.

They wrecked the premiership of David Cameron, who ignored the jealousy his privilege and condescension generated in Michael Gove and other Tories he treated like servants until it was too late for him – and for the UK.

The great Brexit disaster that has pushed this country into unending stagnation had many causes. Snobbery and status anxiety deserve more attention than they receive.

Cameron was the last prime minister to come from the upper-class England that Jane Austen adaptations and Downton Abbey sanitise and market to the world. He was properly posh – a descendant of William IV and one of his mistresses. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and married to Samantha Cameron (née Sheffield), herself a daughter of baronet and a descendant of Charles II and one of his mistresses. (Honestly, you can’t swing a cat in the English aristocracy without hitting some bastard.)

Below them in the Conservative party were people like Michael Gove and his now ex-wife Sarah Vine, who are no different from millions of others who arrive in London, Paris, San Francisco and New York to take apparently good jobs. They quickly learn two bitter truths about life in centres of economic and political power.

First, those good jobs with apparently good salaries cannot even begin to cover the costs of a home in a smart part of town let alone all that is meant to go with it – fine wining and dining, private schools for the kids, a place in the country.

Unless you make fortunes in finance or tech, you will need family money. And if you are from the middle class, as Gove and Vine were, your family doesn’t have the money you need.

Second, they discovered that the old elite will never really accept you. Its members are interested in the super rich because they can sponge off them –Cameron took £3.3 million from the banker Lex Greensill (now under investigation after the sudden collapse of his business).

They are interested in media magnates like Murdoch, who can offer good publicity. Or celebrities who can bring their fame with them – the Camerons picked up Jeremy Clarkson and became his “mate.”

But middle-class people like Gove and Vine?

In the end, they are servants. And although their resentment builds slowly, it can explode, as Gove’s exploded when he turned on Cameron in 2016.

Vine is publishing a memoir of the unravelling next week. I won’t mock her efforts, although many already are. She reveals herself with such guilelessness it feels cruel to laugh. In any case, Vine’s writing is a social document that unintentionally reveals much more than she intends.

Gove knew Cameron at Oxford. By the early 2000s, they were working together in London to bring the Conservatives back to power.

Vine was enchanted to find herself in the world of the stylish and beautiful Samantha Cameron.

At times the extracts from her book read as if she had a full-on crush: