Andrew Mitchell saga is giving Ed Miliband an opportunity to play to Labour's basest instincts, but social mobility is a complex issue and this bear-baiting could backfire
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Andrew Mitchell: wealthy former public schoolboy, and baited bear. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Simon Hoggart is one of my oldest friends, so I try not to say "Simon is right" more than is strictly necessary. But he's 100% right in his parliamentary sketch today when he likens Ed Miliband's assault on the Tory chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, to bear-baiting, which was made illegal in this country in 1835.
It's a month since I last protested that Mitchell had behaved badly in abusing an obstructive police officer who had refused to open Downing Street's security gates for the great man's bike. But I also argued that he'd apologised and it was now time to move on.
It was obvious even then that the police are in an industrial dispute with the government and were politicising the incident for partisan advantage. So were Labour MPs – it's their job, up to a point – Tory newspapers who think Mitchell a bit snooty and too free with the taxpayers' aid money, and some Conservative MPs who don't like him either.
All that has since become even more evident. The West Mercia chapter of the Police Federation had a session with Mitchell – he's a Birmingham MP – which didn't go very well. Afterwards its spokesman demanded his resignation from the government. Who do these people think they are? It's not as if the West Midlands force is covered in glory. It's crime clean-up rate is down, according to a local website, and it was compromised in the Hillsborough cover-up.
As for the press, well they like to have their cake and gobble it too. Today's Daily Mail – my touchstone in these matters – complains about the cops Tasering a blind man (his white stick apparently looked like a Samurai sword) all over page one, but on the inside pages it's Mitchell-baiting as usual.
At a meeting of the backbench 1922 committee of Tory MPs last night more colleagues spoke in his defence than were critical. One of the critics, the MP James Duddridge, who has risen and fallen without much trace, is reported as urging Mitchell to fall on his sword. But he was sacked as a whip last month so that's hardly rocket science.
David Cameron is hanging on to his chief whip, though not without cost. Bad headlines are not what he needs and yesterday's bear-baiting at PMQs took the shine off the better employment figures, which we should welcome even if we don't rate the government's austerity strategy (and we don't, do we?). My hunch is that he'll survive.
But Labour's strategy is to use the affair to reinforce the notion that posh boys like Cameron, George Osborne and Andrew Mitchell – a well-off scion of Rugby School and Cambridge – don't understand real life and are typical of the coalition's overprivileged cabinet. Someone made that point to me on Twitter during PMQs.
That makes sense as political tactics (if not overdone, Ed), but it prompts me to ask if it is actually true. "Less than half the cabinet are very privileged," I told my friend on Twitter. Actually that's an exaggeration, as a quick canter through their Wiki CVs will confirm.
Briefly Cameron, Nick Clegg and chancellor Osborne are famously children of upper middle-class metropolitan privilege. Broadly speaking so are Jeremy Hunt (health) and Owen Paterson (environment), in the sense that they went to well-known public schools and Oxbridge. Lord Strathclyde is quite posh too, like Mitchell the son of a Tory MP who (as it happens) was unfairly hounded by the tabloids in the Vassall spy affair.
More than half the cabinet went to Oxford or Cambridge, but as with Labour or the Thatcher/Major era Tories, that usually reflects academic vigour rather than privilege. Theresa May is a clergyman's daughter whose grammar school became a comp. Chris Grayling went to a state school, so did Phil Hammond, son of an engineer in Essex. Iain Duncan Smith, whose dad was a flying ace in the second world war, attended an RC secondary school and HMS Conway, a school for forces brats.
Justine Greening went to a Rotherham comprehensive, just like William Hague, whose dad was a local pop-maker. Ken Clarke's dad was a watchmaker whose clever son went to Nottingham High – like Ed Balls – and on to Cambridge to become a lawyer. Greening went to Southampton University and became an accountant. And so on.
Vince Cable is a clever working-class boy from York. Danny Alexander attended state schools in the Highlands, then Oxford. Theresa Villiers is a bit posh as her name implies – she went to Francis Holland School in London, then to Bristol U. Eric Pickles speaks for himself and Yorkshire, a grammar school boy who went on to Leeds Poly. Patrrick McLoughlin (transport) is an ex-miner, the son and grandson of miners, who worked as a farm labourer.
The Lib Dem Scottish secretary, Michael Moore, the son of a British army chaplain (there's plenty of army and the church in these CVs), went to grammar school. Maria Miller (culture) went to a comprehensive in Bridgend. David Jones (Wales) went to a Welsh grammar and UCL. The Tory chairman, Grant Shapps – widely known as Michael Green – went to Watford Grammar and a polytechnic.
Now a grammar school is a good start (I attended a small Cornish one myself), and so is a supportive family. But it's not posh or privileged and to say so is as daft as the Tory papers trying to prove (as they do) that Ed Miliband's own background – the son of refugees who attended a north London comp – is posh or privileged. Clever is different.
All of which serves to underline the importance of very the underprivileged (he's got over it) Alan Milburn's latest push – reported here by Patrick Wintour – to ensure that people's backgrounds, their educational contextual data, is taken into account when handing out life's plums, including Oxbridge places.
If we're going to throw bricks at each other – or plums — best to get that contextual data right. We still waste a lot of talent in this country – and all parties share some of the blame.