LIBBY PURVES: The farce of Dave’s Asda wellies shows the sheer idiocy of our obsession with class
![Cameron worries his green Hunter boots make him look too posh](http://web.archive.org./web/20170714181422/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/09/01/00/2BC8B46E00000578-0-Cameron_worries_his_green_Hunter_boots_make_him_look_too_posh-a-32_1441063032101.jpg)
Cameron worries his green Hunter boots make him look too posh
The story of David Cameron’s Wellington boots sums up all you need to know about the most headbanging, ruinously jagged fault line in British politics. It should be set to music and derisively sung in pubs: The Ballad Of The Boot.
The story is told in Sir Anthony Seldon’s authoritative new book about Mr Cameron’s first ten years as Tory leader.
During the Somerset floods last year, the PM went there on a visit.
People were angry and facing huge losses, and though the Prime Minister had been chairing the COBRA emergency meetings, pumps and firefighters were deployed and the army mobilised with sandbags, it was considered vital that David Cameron himself should turn up with a suitably concerned expression on his face.
That’s the first inkling of unreason: the odd modern insistence that, like royal personages, prime ministers must always materialise at the site of disasters instead of beavering away at their real jobs, taking reports from experts on the ground and banging heads together until important work gets done.
Still, we’ve been stuck with that nonsense ever since Mrs Thatcher used to loom up, Diana-style, at the bedside of disaster victims.
Politicians turning up looking serious is considered vital, even if their security fuss means the actual work has to stop.
The killer fact this time, though, is that the PM, who has a country home in a pretty wet part of the Cotswolds, owned only green Hunter wellies. And Hunters are associated with being posh, a gentry snob, a ‘haw-haw, git orf my land!’ type.
Mocked
Though, actually, some people just buy them because, even though they cost more than £50, they last forever and have padded tops that don’t leave red marks on your legs.
Anyway, one of Mr Cameron’s staff rushed to Asda to buy a cheap pair so he could look like a Man of the People.
But it turned out later that people actually took against him because, on that visit, his rubber boots looked shiny and new. The minion who bought them should, of course, have been told to smear on some mud and bang them against a pigsty wall before handing them over.
They were probably right to worry: when the defence secretary Philip Hammond did wear Hunters to visit residents being helped by the Army, he was mocked in the media for it.
Naturally, savvy old Boris wore cheap ones, as did Nick Clegg. Nigel Farage wore waders, maybe since his natural inclination is always to go a bit further than necessary.
Today, we need grown-up, responsible, focused politicians, not dress-up Ken dolls to be shown off in a series of appropriate costumes and attempting a painfully proletariat schooling for their children.
Yet the PM’s terror of being dismissed as an arrogant out-of-touch posho is not unrealistic: people do it to him all the time — in reports and cartoons and sketches and social media.
It is easy to condemn everything the Tories do — not on rational grounds, though often there are plenty of reasons to, but by claiming they can’t possibly mean well.
How, goes the tiresome cliche, can they care about ordinary lives? They’re emotionally disabled by public school, privilege and not knowing what it is to dread the electricity bill and to end every month in the red. They’re aliens from Planet Wealth!
It is reasonable enough to worry about cronyism and suspect a leader of any party who doesn’t bother to seek out different voices but surrounds himself with old friends and hands them gongs and peerages.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170714181422/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/09/01/00/2BDC76D100000578-3217594-image-m-7_1441063685664.jpg)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170714181422/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/09/01/00/2BDC76CD00000578-3217594-image-a-8_1441063694659.jpg)
Naturally, savvy old Boris wore cheap ones, as did Nick Clegg
That happens in all parties: power is a lonely thing and the instinct to keep your mates near is strong, whether they’re school or college chums, lawyers from the same chambers, like Tony Blair and Derry Irvine, or just still in touch ever since the good old days when they were Leftie rebels gingering up the City Council.
The old pals act needs watching and depressingly, it is ever more likely in this age when too many MPs have never had jobs outside politics and therefore have a big pool of political think-alikes to choose from and promote.
But what is really toxic, and fatal to intelligent observation and voting, is this British obsession with nuances of class: the lazy, spiteful presumption that your family background defines your potential forever.
It is unhelpful, destructive and just encourages politicians to behave in a ludicrously hypocritical way and waste time nervously readjusting their image to mesh with the largest available voting bloc.
That very act of disguising yourself, denying your reality out of sheer self-preservation in a jeering online age, damages you, makes you less authentic.
I always rather like it when the Camerons do something a bit Hooray Henry, such as flopping around in wetsuits in the chic bit of Cornwall. It shows they know who they are.
I’d really worry if he started wearing a baseball cap backwards and pretended to like dog racing.
At the moment, with this seemingly patrician set in government, the toffs are the favourite target.
Never a day passes without a jibe about Eton, fagging or posh wellies. They’re assumed to be tainted: cartoon nobs, heirs of Flashman who despise the poor and therefore must deny who they are and what they do in their spare time.
![So Ed Miliband had to talk street — yeah man! — with Russell Brand, another infuriating phoney](http://web.archive.org./web/20170714181422/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/04/28/18/281C2B3600000578-3059492-In_a_trailer_released_tonight_Russell_Brand_challenges_Ed_Miliba-a-90_1430242935072.jpg)
So Ed Miliband had to talk street — yeah man! — with Russell Brand, another infuriating phoney
Meanwhile, in the opposition party, equal contempt falls on its many Islington and Primrose Hill property multimillionaires (many of whom are a lot richer than most genuine toffs).
So Ed Miliband had to talk street — yeah man! — with Russell Brand, another infuriating phoney; and Tony Blair, educated amid the Hogwarts-esque towers of Fettes public school and Oxford, adopted a tiresome crypto cockney, geezerish glottal stop to say: ‘I go-a do the ri’ thing, I’m a pri-iy straight sor-a guy’. Government is too serious a business to get tangled up with this classist nonsense.
It is insulting and simplistic to assume that growing up privileged stops you caring about those who didn’t and that you must be born ‘ordinary’ or poor to care about other people’s needs.
Indeed, the opposite can be the case. William Beveridge, who helped found the welfare state, was educated at Charterhouse; Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell and Clement Attlee at Winchester and Haileybury.
Of course, some great champions of the disadvantaged will always rise from their own ranks to speak for social justice.
But great charities and social reforms have been championed by ‘toffs’: Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children in the early 20th century, grew up on her family estate; William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist, was a wealthy merchant’s son; and Sue Ryder of care home fame was a Benenden girl.
The inverted snobbery that despises Cameron and others for their Eton education and comfortable wellies is no different from the straight- forward kind that made Tory grandees obstructive about the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, not to mention John Major, the variety artiste’s son who succeeded her in his non-Savile Row suit.
It’s a wrong and wasteful instinct, and we’re all tempted to it now and then.
When we had a farm, the agriculture minister John Gummer once turned up in shiny black city shoes, and OK, we giggled a bit.
But that was mainly because we had Large Black pedigree pigs, and a litter of tiny, shiny black piglets flung themselves on the minister’s feet because they took them for siblings.
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