It's hard to work out what was the most offensive aspect of Dominic Raab’s attempt to stand in for the Prime Minister at PMQs.
Was it the wink at Angela Rayner, which in light of recent slurs about the Labour Deputy Leader’s Sharon Stone impression, looked like he was perving for a quick flash?
Was it the inference that she had no right to attend opera at Glyndebourne because, culture-wise, a working-class woman should be watching Jeremy Kyle re-runs on ITV2 before going to the bingo and headbutting her mate for nicking her dabber?
Was it the accusation that she is a “Champagne socialist”, implying you cannot drink alcohol and believe in a more equal world unless you share plastic bottles of supermarket cider with the homeless?
Or was it simply that someone with all the appeal of a dose of monkeypox, who is thicker than a Tarmac sandwich, is a missing heartbeat away from running Britain?
But back to the charge laid by Raab (born Home Counties, educated Oxford and Cambridge, ex-City lawyer) that Rayner (northern council estate, left school at 16 pregnant and without qualifications, ex-care worker) was a class traitor for accepting the invite to drink champagne at an opera festival from a musician friend.
How succinctly do his words sum up the contemptuous Tory attitude to the Red Wall constituents they pretend to care about?
As in “we want your votes but we also want you to know your place, you philistine oiks. So put more gravy on your chips and leave the high-brow stuff to us”.
This is the essence of Toryism or organised spivvery as Nye Bevan called it. They enter politics to ensure life’s riches are preserved for the few. That’s why the wealthiest bankroll them.
If they publicly taunt working-class people for aspiring to the finer things in life, imagine what they say about them in private after token trips up North?
Probably “why do they always wear T-shirts with writing on them, eat such bad food, and have appalling diction?”
Or as my late colleague James Whitaker (so snooty he did his hospital urine samples into a champagne flute) once said to me, “it’s just as well they don’t teach working-class people like you how to speak properly or you’d be dangerous”.
More importantly, what a mockery it makes of their so-called levelling-up crusade which is supposed to redistribute wealth and life chances to people in the poorest areas.
It’s clearly a giant con as it goes against their core belief that the status quo needs to be preserved. So they are never going to legislate to let the working-class have the same opportunities as them.
Being conservative literally means not changing. Keeping things as they are.
Believing the poor deserve to be poor. It’s why the likes of Raab can coldly dismiss desperate people forced to visit food banks as “simply having a cash-flow problem”.
Maybe that’s why so many Tory MPs in those Red Wall seats hope to save their skins at the next election by defecting to Labour.
Maybe they realise their constituents have sussed that they were conned by politicians who look down their noses at them, and have decided to ditch the frauds the next chance they get.
Who knows? But I will never know why a working-class person could vote for them in the first place.
