Labour buries head in sand with the politics of envy

What I am trying to get around to is that life remains a series of choices for everyone, to adapt Nicholas Ridley's famous remark about the community charge, from a dustman to a Duke. Some people spend a fortune on cigarettes or booze, some gamble or buy ludicrous amounts of new clothes each month, while others pay to educate their children at independent or public schools.
It probably won't surprise most people reading this blog to learn that many of my friends, including some of relatively modest means, have chosen the private education route for their children because they don't believe local schools in the state sector are good enough. They scrimp and save, go without holidays and new cars, but that's their choice and long may it remain so.
But this must, it seems, come as a complete shock to the numbskulls running Labour's by-election campaign in Crewe & Nantwich.
There's a real war going on in this part of the North-west. A class war.
Not since Denis Healey threatened to tax the rich until the pips squeaked have we witnessed such hatred and old-left envy.
The Tory candidate for the seat made vacant by the death of Labour's Gwyneth Dunwoody, you see, is a toff.
Edward Timpson stands accused of benefiting from inherited wealth, a private education and lives in a "mansion" in, God forbid, the countryside.
Labour detects a trend here. Conservative leader David Cameron is an Old Etonian, as is Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, which makes both of them posher than posh. Just to hammer home the point, Labour activists dressed in top hats and tails have been tracking Mr Timpson around the constituency handing out leaflets with supposed witty remarks such as: "Do you live in a big mansion house? Do you think regeneration is adding another wing to your mansion?"
All pretty puerile stuff, which to judge by reports has succeeded in alarming a number of Government Ministers.
So it should do, because Labour is on course to lose the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, and lose it badly.
The by-election campaign is being masterminded (if that is the right word) by Birmingham Labour MP Steve McCabe, who has been quoted as saying: "It's about giving a bloody nose. Timpson is someone who is from an excessively privileged background who has shown virtually no interest."
The words pots and kettles spring to mind from a party whose previous leader, Tony Blair, attended Fettes, known as the Eton of the North, and which over the years has since the war been led by ex-public school boys Michael Foot, Hugh Gaitskell and Clement Attlee and has had a fair sprinkling of privately educated men and women in cabinets and shadow cabinets.
By sanctioning such tactics, and I am assuming that some out of touch loon in the party's hierarchy has approved Mr McCabe's strategy, Labour is showing itself to be hopelessly removed from modern Britain. Dangerously for a movement whose very survival in the long term depends on attracting aspirational middle class voters (something understood by Thatcher, Blair and Mandelson) Labour is in default mood, reacting to horrendous local election results by reverting to what it quaintly calls its working class roots.
The party has gone back in time almost 50 years, and it didn't work then either. Harold Wilson, before the 1964 General Election, asked what the Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, another Old Etonian, could know of "the problems of ordinary people". Douglas-Home replied, in remarks that has gone down in political folklore, that although he might be a 14th Earl, Wilson was, after all, the 14th Mr Wilson.
I suspect the good people of Crewe & Nantwich couldn't give a damn whether their next MP went to Eton, or Etone for that matter.
And on the matter of Etone, Mr McCabe and his fellow class warriors might like to consider what happened in Nuneaton on May 1, when the local council switched from Labour to Conservative control for the first time in 35 years.
And not an Old Etonian in sight.