Why the long face, Dave?

For almost all of the fifty years during which it has been acting as a prominent critic and lampooner of the incompetent, the corrupt and the pompous in British public life, the indispensable Private Eye has featured a largely unchanged cover design. Speech bubbles are added to black-and-white photographs, creating a topical joke every fortnight. The quality varies, but they are often very good.

A particularly insightful gag graced the cover of the fiftieth anniversary issue (Eye No. 1300). For all the legal battles won and all the scandals uncovered, the Eye guys admit that after a half century of the organ's relentless efforts, the nation today remains, in some very important ways, surprisingly similar to the one which the magazine began satirising in the early sixties. A bold headline reads "HOW SATIRE MAKES A DIFFERENCE". Under this, to the left, a photo of Harold Macmillan is captioned "1961: Magazine pokes fun at Old Etonian Prime Minister surrounded by cronies making a hash of running the country". To the right, a picture of David Cameron is captioned "2011: Er..."

Writing last week about the hilarious Horsegate affair, journalist Iain Martin contends that the ostensibly silly business tells us (or reminds us of) a few important truths. Among these, Martin argues, is that Downing Street was worried to the point of being initially inclined to deny the allegations being directed at the PM. "For days they squirmed," writes Martin, first denying that Cameron had ridden the retired police horse loaned to former News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks by her inappropriately close friends at the Met. Then, Martin continues, the people at Number 10 were "saying they didn't know, and then that he might have done." Cameron's team, he argues, will be concerned about the ongoing Leveson enquiry and what else may come to light if it "gets stuck into the links between the political elite and News International management when it is done dealing with journalists and the police."

Another of the lessons Martin draws from the affair of the borrowed steed is that Cameron's greatest weakness, in terms of his ability to connect with the country as a whole, "is the perception that he doesn't understand what motivates and concerns millions of his fellow Britons, particularly the people he needs to vote for him next time." As Martin observes, the Prime Minister leads a cabinet of millionaires and a government that has brought a lot more people than ever before into the 40p tax bracket. Many of those same people, Martin reminds us, are about to receive a new blow with the removal of their child benefit. This measure seems very poorly thought out.

The Guardian's Polly Curtis suggests that the current plan - cuting child benefit for households that include one higher-rate taxpayer - has three main problems. Firstly, she observes, a couple could jointly earn £80,000 and continue to receive child benefit while a single parent earning £43,000 would lose it. Secondly, Curtis argues, a "cliff edge" effect is created, whereby to move up a tax bracket is to incur a double whammy or financial penalties - losing child benefit at the same time as paying more tax on any extra income. Finally, says Curtis, major bureaucratic hurdles must be overcome - our tax system is designed around collecting money from individuals and would therefore need to be re-engineered to find ways of assessing the income of households.

For those of us who spent our formative years under the Premierships of Thatcher, Major and Blair, it seems hard to understand why a Conservative government would want to squeeze the incomes and the standard of living of the middle classes in this way. All three Prime Ministers did rather well out of selling a middle class lifestyle to the country at large. Thatcher worked hard to eradicate the political and social culture of the British working class, seeking to create new generations of voters naturally inclined to favour her party at the ballot box. Her plan was multi-faceted. On one hand, the power of the trades unions was relentlessly attacked during the reign of the Iron Lady, with her most notable victory being over the miners, whose leaders were naive enough to be tricked into a war of attrition that the government had, for some time, been equipping itself to win. On the other hand, billions of pounds' worth of social housing stock was almost given away. The right-to-buy scheme offered council house tenants the option to purchase their homes at rock bottom prices and was part of a wider plan to create a 'property-owning democracy'. Bit by bit, the Conservative Government of the day bullied and bought the stubbornly Labour-aligned working classes out of existence.

By 1990, John Major was predicting that "in the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society." The deputy to the notionally Labour PM Tony Blair suggested, albeit in different terms, that this project was complete when he remarked in 1997 that "we are all middle class now." All of this was about the normalisation of a set of values around the desirability of everyone aspiring to own a home, prioritising wealth over everything else and looking down at those whose lack of ambition or ability kept them 'stuck' in 'dead-end' jobs. As was discussed here at some length back in July last year, without people prepared to do those 'dead-end' jobs (cleaning the floors of our hospitals, wiping the backsides of our elderly relatives, stacking the shelves of the supermarkets), our civilised and comfortable society could not function.

So by the second decade of the twenty-first century we have a arrived at a state of affairs whereby, as Owen Jones argues in his excellent book Chavs, open mockery of hard-working people with poorly paid jobs  has become widespread and mainstream. We have also seen an expansion in the coverage of the ugly word that Jones chose for the the title of his book. Who are the chavs? Do we just mean hostile, trouble-making youths dressed in polyester? Or do we mean just about any working class person who stubbornly refuses to aspire to the trappings of a middle class lifestyle? It depends who you ask. Either way, ours is a society in which the  aspiration to have that middle class lifestyle is seen as an undeniably good thing.

In electing David Cameron as their leader, however, the Conservatives have installed a Prime Minister who does not represent the triumph of that kind of aspiration. Cameron's life has been markedly different from the lives of the two previous Tory premiers. Margaret Thatcher, famously, was the daughter of small-town grocer and was raised in the flat about one of her father's two shops. John Major was the son of a music hall performer and the grandson of a bricklayer. The careers of both could be seen to represent a triumph of the aspiration and self-reliance at the heart of their party's values. Cameron is of quite different stock, the Eton-educated son of a stockbroker and grandson of a baronet. Critics can easily argue that his rise to power harks back to an age when a high-born elite could expect to run the country while grocers' daughters and grammar school boys were expected to know their place.

Iain Martin notes that the "imagery of Horsegate is not helpful to the Tories". The image, then, is of an Old Etonian enjoying country pursuits in the company of an old schoolmate who gets a free horse from the taxpayer-funded Metropolitan Police. The timing, as Martin has reminded us, is unfortunate, given that those who have lived Tory values by working to get a comfortable salary are to be rewarded with an erosion of their standard of living. As Martin argues, "there is no sense that the government understands those people, or, even more importantly, the many more earning a good deal less than the level at which 40p in the pound is paid, but who aspire to get there one day through hard work."

Cameron's performance when finally admitting that he had ridden the police horse borrowed by his old chum Charlie Brooks and his wife Rebekah was not reassuring for anyone feeling alienated by any perceived attack on the middle class standard of living and on the culture of aspiration to achieve that lifestyle. 

"If a confusing picture has emerged...", Cameron begins, using the agentless passive voice.

A "confusing picture" cannot just "emerge" on its own. People working for the Prime Minister deliberately created a "confusing picture", very probably on his instructions. An more honest rewording, then, would begin "if I have created a confusing picture..."

These opening few words are then followed by "I'm very, umm, sorry about that." But this part is skipped through more quickly and quietly, with that moment of hesitation before uttering the actual word of apology. The parents among us may be reminded of the reluctance with which our offspring insincerely apologise for their little misdeeds only when compelled to do so.

When Cameron speaks about his friendship with Charlie Brooks, he sighs with audible impatience. The little sigh and the irritated frown speak volumes. Cameron is affronted by the need to explain himself. He is not used to having his actions questioned because he has gone about his life with a sense of being entitled to all the advantages his upbringing has conferred upon him. The script prepared by Dave's people appears to contain a few self-deprecating jokes. But the delivery is humourless and peevish. In this interview, Cameon's lack of the common touch is striking - and the common touch may be just what's needed if people are to be sold the line that the Government's relentless push to reduce the country's deficit must come at the cost of making it harder for ordinary folk to live comfortably as a result of hard work and the kind of ambition the Tories have spent decades selling to us as a good thing.