The shadow foreign secretary was on Friday branded “dismissive” for calling the Tories not the right “class of people” to be running Britain.
David Lammy said Conservative MPs had a “public-school smallness” which he suggested made them unfit to lead the country.
But Tory Education Secretary Gillian Keegan blasted the comments as “arrogant”.
“I don’t know where he is coming from,” Ms Keegan told Times Radio.
“There is nothing public school, or small, I don’t think about me and many of my colleagues. People who think they know how the working class think or feel, that they have to be run by a certain person.
“I myself grew up in Liverpool, left school at 16 and I am now celebrating my 40th year of working full time...I don’t accept the comments at all. I think they just point to something else actually, both arrogant and dismissive, and I don’t accept them at all.”
In an interview with the New Statesman, Mr Lammy, who is running as MP for Tottenham, described attending this month’s Trooping the Colour with ex PM Boris Johnson, Lord David Cameron and home secretary James Cleverly. All three senior Conservatives were privately educated.
“There was a sort of demob happiness about them, a sort of casual frippery, a certain kind of public-school smallness,” he said. “They are not the class of people that Britain needs to run it now, and that’s what my own life story tells me.
“The Labour Party is full of people — Angela Rayner, for instance. I was with her yesterday, campaigning in Mansfield — she gets this.”
