Planet Eton just doesn’t get it

Planet Eton just doesn’t get it

When it comes to appealing to working class voters, it’s clearly a case of one out, one in for the Tories.

Scared that she might defect to UKIP, Nadine Dorries has been grudgingly readmitted back into the fold following her unannounced sojourn in the Australian outback with Ant and Dec on ‘I’m A Celebrity…’

Now we learn courtesy of this morning’s Daily Telegraph that David Cameron’s only Black working-class adviser, Shaun Bailey, has been demoted, had his pay cut in half and been thrust to the edges of the Downing Street Empire. In case he really didn’t get the message, he’s also been left without a desk.

Bailey was one of Cameron’s aces in the days when he was trying to shake off the ‘nasty party’ associations which had killed the Tories’ chances with ethnic minority voters. He was a community activist and heavily promoted as the new face of modern, Cameroon conservatism. He was quickly shoe-horned into a marginal seat at the last election and brought into the Downing Street fold when he didn’t win.

That was then. Now, in the days of the Lynton Crosby ascendancy, Cameron’s billowing big tent has been replaced by a zipped-up bivuac. The environment and minorities have been replaced as signature issues by welfare and immigration. But there’s another, more pervasive reason why Bailey clearly feels his face doesn’t fit. A ‘friend’ sums up his frustration:

“Shaun always says that you can see from space that the place is dominated by those from Eton.”

He claims to have been let out of Cameron’s inner circle for questioning the Tories’ lack of appeal to working class and ethnic minority voters. To add in the now obligatory scene from The Thick of It, Bailey was said to have been left “horrified” after a Downing Street polling session with Cameron’s advisers:

The friend said: “The pollster asked them what kept them awake at night and they didn’t even have the wit to understand that he meant it was the electorate.

“When the pollster pointed that out to them, they literally said, ‘Nothing keeps us awake’. How can you be advising people and nothing keeps you awake? Then someone said ‘school fees’.”

That’s of course private school fees. Once you move in the rarefied world of Planet Eton you assume everyone knows what you’re talking about when you say ‘school fees’.

David Cameron and the growing part of his entourage who come from Planet Eton might not get it, but Bailey or a working class scouser like Nadine Dorries do; famously pointing out that “posh boys” Cameron and Osborne don’t know the price of a bottle of milk.

So does David Skelton. He’s the urbane former deputy director of Toryish think tank Policy Exchange who has left to set up a campaigning group trying to help the Tories find better rapport with working class and ethnic voters, particularly in the north. The treatment of Bailey shows the size of the task he has on his hands.

Socially, the top of the Tory party is now the narrowest it’s been since the early 1960s. The party of Harold MacMillan and Alec Douglas-Home may have been posh, but it was also a party of One Nation progressives. Now it is just posh and right-wing. Cameron’s attempts at vajazzling the Tories by promoting people like Bailey are long gone.

The lack of social mix and the inability to relate to everyday concerns will see Cameron’s chumocracy eventually become unstuck. Despite being awash with a culture of casual nepotism, politics remains a great leveller. The most academically smart are often guileless. The moneyed and privately-educated really don’t know how the other half lives.

Planet Eton may sneer at someone like Bailey, but there are far more people like him than there are people like them.