Despite all the huffing and puffing about how the Tories care for what they might term “ordinary” people in so called Red Wall seats, places like Wrexham where I live, if you scratch the surface of a Tory MP you usually find an unashamed snob who secretly despises those he or she views as the peasantry. Sometimes the guard slips. Media minister John Whittingdale today said:
“People who are important should be entitled to avoid tough quarantine rules when travelling to the UK”
He is referring to UEFA officials, their guests and sponsors of the European football championship. There you go, rich and powerful people can go infect whoever they want but it is another rule for those Whittingdale deems unimportant, who just want to have a dance at the wedding of their daughter or go for a week by the Med.
At the weekend, another Tory was reflecting on the Chesham by-election disaster and 2019 Tory gains in the red wall seats and suggested that the Tories were losing support from those who owned bookshelves and gaining it from those who went to the bookies. How droll. One imagines how other Tory MPs hooted as they imagined, because they’d never mix with, those horrible working-class folks who don’t read anything other than the racing pages in the Sun and squander their wages on gambling or probably at the Working Men’s club.
Those rich folk allowed to go maskless and avoid social distancing at Ascot last week, they would never squander their, inherited, cash on gambling would they? And the braying Top hatted folks at Ascot are all studious bookworms are they not?
It was a good decade or more ago when Tory Housing Minister Sir George Young, now Lord Young, noted that the homeless are the sort of people you trip over on your way home from the Opera. That is how Tory MPs really do think.
The Tories usually hide how much they despise the working classes. Labour is more honest in saying how much it despises the old-fashioned and non-metropolitan views and attitudes of the working classes, things like loving your country. Your choice: closet snobs vs open snowflakes.