Erm, who of the other bunch, including the Lib Dems, doesn’t fail this test. I can think of very few. Alan Johnson? Any others who are senior? If this test disqualifies Cameron, it disqualifies most of the political class.

And who is in touch?

Mr Moral Compass?
Or the niece of the Earl of Longford, perhaps?
Lord Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire?

Amazingly I agree with Sunny that there is a case to be made along the “many not the few” line for Labour. A paper-thin case, but a case.

But not along the Eton line. That’s madness. (So please, go ahead…)

Good article, but one flaw from your logic: it appears to solve anything you have to live through it? But by the time someone from the sort of background you describe has escaped poverty and acquired the ability to do something, have not the experiences of poverty also changed?

The argument therefore does not ultimately convince me – to solve something you have to understand it, not to experience it. I agree that Messrs Cameron and Blair lacked intellectual rigour in understanding problems (and despite his PhD, Mr Brown likewise) but this is nothing to do with background. I suspect either is capable of acquiring the understanding, but chose not to in favour of media presentation or whatever else.

So in that you have indicated we need leaders with real intellectual rigour, I agree with you (I doubt you will like the reminder that the last we had was Mrs Thatcher though – and before that Mr Wilson?). In that only those who suffer can provide a solution, I think you are confusing experience and understanding.

It matters because life, for David Cameron, has been, for the most part, far too easy and far too short on genuine adversity and the kinds of difficult personal experiences that, once upon a time, would have been universally referred to as ‘character building’.

Yes, I believe losing your eldest child after six years of relentless pain and misery is a fucking bundle of laughs. Piece of piss really, sort of thing you breeze through without it being remotely a difficult personal experience.

In a lecture today at the thinktank Demos on how families build character, he said he had found the social science equivalent of E=MC2.

Fabulously rigorous reporting this, given that the actual Cameron line was “it would be over the top to say that it is to social science what E=MC2 is to physics”. Especially as Cameron’s point was not that there is no correlation between poverty and poor child outcomes, but that poverty makes good parenting harder.

He doesn’t know what its like to have to go rooting around down the back of the settee for loose change in the vain hope of finding enough to cover the cost of a tin of beans,and least of all what its like to have to do that or go hungry.

He hasn’t got the foggiest idea what its like to sit in complete silence with the curtains drawn and lights turn-off in the hope that the debt-collector at your front door will think you’re not at home and go away, or what its like to walk several miles to work and back because every bus journey you make would mean one less meal for your kids this week.

He hasn’t got a clue what it means to dread the arrival of the gas bill or to have turn off the heating for all but an hour or two a day in the hope that the emergency credit on your token meter will hold out for a couple of days until you can collect your pension or family allowance.

He’s never been there, in person. He’s never faced up to those kind of situations and he certainly didn’t grow up in circumstances in which those experiences were just a part of every day life – not poverty or adversity but simply things you saw you parents just so the family could survive.

He has absolutely no fucking idea what life is really like for the millions of people in Britain for whom simply getting through to the next pay cheque without being cold or hungry is a victory.

Cry me a fucking river. This is emotive bollocks of the first water. How many top flight politicians do have this sort of experience? Is it your suggestion that only impoverished unemployed people can become Prime Minister? Or, given that it appears to be your position that personal experience of every facet of Government is needed, could you perhaps suggest the sort of experience that would qualify you? After all, only one Prime Minister that this country has ever had has had the sort of experience you demand. And he was shit.

It’s true that none of our politicians seem to have gone through this hardship. But judging by their accents probably none of our doctors/lawyers/CEOs/bankers have either…

And doesn’t that in itself piss all over Cameron’s message?

People in shitty jobs tend to come from poor backgrounds and people in good jobs tend to be from better off backgrounds – we see it every day, it’s not rocket science

Cameron may fail the ‘shared experience’ test (upon which a lack of empathy is predicted) but as I’m sure many posters will point out this of itself should NOT be a bar to political office.

If the public want a smarmy toff leading them then that is a matter for them to decide, surely?

Incidentally it is my own belief that high political office and nurturing family relationships are virtually a contradiction in terms.

Lets take Tony B’s children (Leo, Euan, Nicky & Catherine) as an example.
How often is the former war monger home, or in the mood to deal with the disparate needs of his four children or the day to day vagaries of domestic life?
I mean how much ‘quality time’ does each child get to spend alone with Dad, a few precious minutes per day perhaps (if they are lucky) – or does he pack the sproggs in a suitcase and ship them off to the Middle East or the States when he is coining it in on the lecture circuit?

The paranoia and fear surrounding the role of the PM is the epitome of a poisoned chalice, especially if you want to be a good parental role model.

Interesting how the mention of Eton gets the right fulminating at the injustice – must be striking a nerve.

It’s perfectly possible for someone to go to Eton and develop an understanding of how the other 99% live – but Cameron, Osborne, Johnson et al don’t seem the type. Which may be why their policies benefit the 1%.

Excellent article by Unity.

As for the cries that Labour (except maybe for Alan Johnson and a few others) is also like that, this is exactly what was anticipated years ago during The Great Blair Purge i.e. the risk that by shattering working class roots and turning into near-clones of the Conservatives, any potential flaw that might be spotted amongst the Tories can be easily refuted with “you can talk” and “pot and kettle”.

However, while it’s true that Cameron is not alone in having lived pampered from financial hardship, struggle for employment, low wages, etc… him, Boris and his Cabinet are undoubtedly extremely privileged.

It’s true that in other countries you hardly ever get a President or PM of firm working class or even low middle class roots. But the level of privilege that the potential next administration enjoyed through their whole life is unique.

Do I take it from this post, Unity, that you WERE born into a Hovis ad?

There is nothing noble about poverty and it does not necessarily impart intellectual rigour. Nor it is not necessary to have experienced deprivation in order to work to eradicate it. What a poor background does give is an impetus to the individual to improve their situation by education, work and ingenuity and, when enough are so motivated, the collective effort impoves the wealth and health of society as a whole.

Blunt that motivation for the poor, as we have done over the last twenty years, and the result is the growth of an indolent underclass, not poor in absolute terms, but their lives blighted by the patronage of the state.

Didn’t George Orwell go to Eton? Bloody Conservatives get everywhere – tish, tish and perhaps thrice tish.

@Tim J – ***applause***

Of course Margaret Thatcher and John Major were relatively “normal” in terms of background…

@4 “only one Prime Minister that this country has ever had has had the sort of experience you demand. And he was shit”

Who was that? Major?

I quite liked the logic and research in this piece, but my enjoyment was thwarted by a mass of typos. These paragraphs in particular made reading quite difficult:

“However, as Demos rightly notes, the actual evidence, when assessed by unblinkered researchers, demonstrates what some of us, myself included, have been saying all along[;] that family structures are not particula[r] important. What actually matters [in] the quality of family life, not the number of parents or conformity to [a] particular, religiously-mandat[e], family roles and structure.

Two-parent families do provide better outcomes, statistically, than lone parent families but this not because there’s something magical about marriage or the role of, in the main, fathers as male role models. [Is] simply because the division of labour in a two-parent household makes it easier to devote more time to parenting, as is equally the case when parenting [in] undertaken within the kind of exten[d] family structure and matriarchal family networks that are, today, found primarily in Britain’s migrant communities but which were once commonplace amongst the working class.”

Not to nitpick, but you’re frequently using the wrong words here, making it extremely difficult to read at a comfortable pace.

Again, liked the article, it just could have done with one more proofread.

Thanks,

Felix

@12 – yes I can only think of Major coming close (to both descriptions!)

Of course Margaret Thatcher and John Major were relatively “normal” in terms of background…

Yes, they both were, as was Callaghan, Wilson and even Edward Health, whose own family came from relative humble beginnings.

In terms of Party Leaders Hague and Howard weren’t privileged. For future Labour potentials you have Johnson, Cruddas and Burnham. Can’t think of any LDs, but perhaps I don’t know them well enough.

Point is, by this test, the pool of available candidates is pretty small. After the election things might expand a bit, in London I can think of Bailey (tory) and Umuna (Lab), but still, they’ll be new and not remotely ready.

This really is 1st class bollocks. Cameron, by watching his six year old child die, has probably experienced far more suffering than the average person. He may have been financially secure all his life (how I wish I could say that!), but that isn’t the only standard of experience.

Are you saying that politicians can only ocme from humble backgrounds? That only good politicians come from humble backgrounds? That all politicians need a dose of ‘real life’ before they can serve in office?

What is the wider principle you’re arguing for here? Or is it just an attack on Cameron – if so, then it is a pretty big fail really.

12/14 While Major might come closest of modern Prime Ministers, he really wasn’t born into the sort of grinding poverty that Unity is describing here – decayed middle class rather than someone “for whom simply getting through to the next pay cheque without being cold or hungry is a victory.”

The person I had in mind was Ramsay MacDonald, who really was born into grim poverty. Illegitimate son of a housemaid and a crofter. Saw his father (according to the stories anyway) once, across a field. ‘Yon’s your father Ramsay…’

And while it might be a touch unfair to say that he was shit, lets say that his achievements in destroying the Labour Party are as yet unmatched. Although there is another Labour Prime Minister whose first name is also James…

The fact that the pool of MPs that “pass” this test is small (and there are more than you identify, but I take the point) is not evidence that Unity’s argument is wrong, but that we need more MPs who have had these experiences themselves. Even that is not guarantee that they will pursue the right policies, but it helps.

#17

not all MPs, maybe, but the imbalance we have at the moment is problematic, and with Cameron & his shadow cabinet in power it would only get worse.

“He has absolutely no fucking idea what life is really like for the millions of people in Britain for whom simply getting through to the next pay cheque without being cold or hungry is a victory.”

Nor I suspect, do most people in this country.

@18 Thanks. I was going to hazard Ramsay MacDonald… honest.

I believe the last OE as Prime Minister was Alec Douglas-Home? I don’t think anybody really hated him.

When was the last time we had such a completely transparent, pointless wanker as David Cameron as PM? (Blair excepted).

[11] “Of course Margaret Thatcher and John Major were relatively “normal” in terms of background… ” – which just goes to demonstrate that dysfunctional personalities are not necessarily class dependent.

Do Mark & Carol (Thatch) reflect on Maggie’s standard of parenting, almost certainly.

The son of the ex-circus performer (Major) also has x2 sproggs – I’ve not heard much about them.
Still, it didn’t stop the old Brixtonian from getting it on with Egwina.
The widespread reporting of their 4 year affair must have been difficult for his children to deal with?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2286008.stm

Yes, rich, poor, or plain old middle class, high office certainly seems to attract its fair share of idiosyncratic personalities?

22 – Douglas-Home was indeed the last OE PM. In fact, he was the last public school PM until Blair. But then, most of them went to grammar schools…

If we’re looking for senior politicians with a really tough life, it’s hard to go much further than Phillip Snowden who suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, and could barely walk from the age of 30 or so. Although David Blunkett’s story of being left at the school for the blind is also pretty heart-breaking.

Unity seems to have hit the same raw nerve as Deborah Orr did last week:

Even the important things Cameron learned from his first-born son cannot be transformed into solid electoral asset. People face so many other complex disadvantages and setbacks, of which Cameron has no experience. By arguing that he understands the importance of one public service, because he has direct knowledge of its importance, he risks indicating that he is a man who can only gain real awareness of problems by actually undergoing them. That’s why all the stuff about Eton, Oxford, family money and gilded careers really is a difficulty for the Conservatives.

Ernie Bevin came from a poor background but he did not have a chip on his shoulder. When as Foreign Secretarysomeone complained there were too many public school boys in the FO, his reply was ” They did all right in the Battle of Britain”.

Attlee went to Haileybury and employed many people from his old school; Keynes went to Eton, Foot went to Leighton Park School, Gaitskill and Dick Crossman to Winchester, Tony Benn to Westminster, Callaghan sent his daughter ot Habs Girl’s School, and Beveredge went to Charterhouse .

What is the difference between Tony Benn going to Westminster and spending a few years at the BBC and Cameron going to Eton and spending 7 yrs in PR at Carlton Communications? H Harman spending 4 years at Liberty before becoming an MP gives her less experience of work than Cameron who spent 7 years at Carlton Communications.

If we are going to criticise politicians lets do so based on their judgement.
Obviously if we want politicians with experience, then the Labour Party have practically no one who has been in combatyet have sent British service personel into bsattle with inadequate equipment. Presumably the minister for DIFID should have experience of torture, rape, hunger and disease in order for them to be adequately sympathetic to those who have experienced such horrors.

Conservatives always engage in projection. So they always project onto their opponents their very own weakness’s. This is very easy for them since they have the majority of the media on side.
So to point out that Cameron is a toff, who has never had to do a real hard days work in his life, is according to them ……. Class war.

But this is nothing to the real class war that Cameron and his rich friends are about to inflict on the poorest people in the UK.

Avery good example of this projection was GW Bush and Dick Cheney. Neither went to Vietnam to serve when they had the chance. Cheney had 5 deferments, and took the opportunity to marry his wife almost immediately a law was past to stop married men being called up for service. And yet they managed to project this weakness onto Kerry who had served in Vietnam and had won medals for his service.

Class war is constantly being fought by Conservatives.

What starts as a good dissection of the paper-thin veneer of academic rigour surrounding the Conservative social breakdown agenda descends into a “you don’t know what it’s like” rant, which is unfortunate.

Many have pointed out the absurdity of insisting that social problems can only be fixed by those who’ve experienced them first-hand. Following this logic to its conclusion would mean not only disqualifying most politicians, but a large swathe of the international academic community too. I put it to you, Unity, that there are a great many academics in the UK and elsewhere who haven’t come from poverty to where they are, and are yet producing first-rate academic work dissecting the issue and the effectiveness of various efforts to tackle it.

The real problem with Cameron being an Oxbridge-educated public school boy is, as the first part of your piece points out, that it gives him a degree of intellectual weight and self-confidence that he doesn’t merit.

There is a wider, very serious point to be made about the degree to which politicians rely on partisan think-tanks rather than university-employed academics for the research that underpins their policies – something that is quite rarely explored in the print media or the blogosphere; it’s therefore altogether more disheartening to see you neglect that issue in favour of several paragraphs worth of ranting.

It’s interesting how selectively the above pieces of information are taken into account by the right-wingers on this side.

Some say, “ok Cameron went to Eaton, but also Attlee and Tony Benn and blah blah went to posh schools”.

Some erect a pretty pathetic strawman, i.e. “only impoverished unemployed people can become Prime Minister”.

Others choose to desperately cling onto the Carlton bit saying that some Labour politicians similarly worked for television companies.

Others focus only on money, of course saying that Labour too has its share of loaded people.

Etc… You get the gist.

The point is that David Cameron is amongst the very few who embody ALL those characteristics. He comes from an incredibly wealthy background, a direct descendant of the royal family. He also went to the poshest most elitist school in the country and then the poshest most elitist University in the country. He landed a dream job straightaway. He’s always lived in the most affluent areas of London.

Not only that. He is also surrounded by top Tories from an uncannily similar background, with all of the above characteristics. This, to me is the crux of the problem.

Even the Sunday Times, notorious for its communist leanings, wrote in 2006 that “David Cameron has more Etonians around him than any leader since Macmillan. ”

So you can do what right wingers excel at: argue the toss and focus on the speck of sawdust as opposed to the plank in your own eye, but if I was a Tory I’d be a bit peed off that, in 2010, all the party can pull off for the top 3 jobs (plus many more around them) is superprivileged aristotoffs that only about 0.01% of the population would be able to identify with.

“if I was a Tory I’d be a bit peed off that, in 2010, all the party can pull off for the top 3 jobs (plus many more around them) is superprivileged aristotoffs that only about 0.01% of the population would be able to identify with.”

But that is standard for the tories, even when their own party is run by a bunch of tofs they come on here to tell us that it is the Labour party who fight class war.

Unity’s article should be entitled “It’s grim up North”.

Of course, Cameron has no experience of grinding poverty; nor do the vast majority of politicians; nor do the vast majority of British people.

It doesn’t disqualify them from office.

29. Claude. Tony Wedgewood Benn who tried to become deputy leader of the Labour Party was the son of an aristocrat and Westminster was probaly more elitist in the 18C than Eton. Tony Wedgewood Benn married an American heiress and has largely lived in Holland Park, an even more expensive part of London than Nottinghill. Wedgewood Benn has inherited part his name from the Wedgewood Family who were hardly exactly poor by the end of the 19 century.

Gaitskill and Crossman went to Winchester, founded before Eton and definately a far more academically selective school.

Charlie2,
mate, keep up will you?
I already said that I know about Tony Benn and plent of others with had an “elitist” background.

The point is…you’ve never had such a blanket elitist background regarding the top people in the country the way it would be if the Tories were to win the next elections. Not in such an overwhelming way.

Countdown for the next commenter namedropping a Labour MP who also went to Oxbridge now… and we go round in circles…

What’s wrong with being Oxbridge educated?

33. Claude . Surely pointing out that Cameron was completely ignorant of the level of personal, corporate and national debt and the threat it posed to Britain is a far greater issue? It is not the fact that Cameron went to Eton or Oxford is important; it is the fact that he read PPE yet appears to understand very little economics, which make him an equal of Brown.

On the evidence of the above, anyone would think that when the last round of Tory leadership elections were held, everyone here was hoping that David Davis would win.

Was that the case? I don’t know.

In fact, the last time I recall the man being the topic of discussion here, when he immolated his career in order to stop ID cards – an issue close to the heart of many here – yet the consensus seemed to be that he shouldn’t be supported because it might be seen as support for the rest of his nasty, rightist policies. (Even when he had said that it was a single issue by-election). I totally get Claude’s point – that a single Etonian as leader is different from a Cabinet stuffed with them but, if anyone here pointed out at the time that Davis’ disappearance from the front bench was unfortunate inasmuch as it represented a loss of socio-economic diversity, I don’t remember it.

The other problem with Unity’s point of view seems to me to be that it is the wrong way up. By insisting that you have to have experienced poverty to qualify for the top jobs you fail to understand one of the aspects of poverty that make it so revolting. Part of what is ghastly about poverty is precisely that it makes it harder for those born into it to get where they want to be in life – in politics or in any other field.

the veneer imparted by his upbringing and education masks a deep-seated lack of intellectual rigour

Huh?

Can a lack be deep-seated? Any cabinet makers here who’d care to explain how you ‘impart’ a veneer?

And this appears in a post suggesting that David Cameron isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Pot, kettle, black.

David Davis did have the sort of upbringing you’re describing. So, is it okay if he briefs Cameron on hardship when necessary?

And by the way, Gordon Brown gre up in a manse – only one step down the social ladder from the laird’s hoos.

Just love to watch the trolls on their knees bowing to their Toff masters.

Claude @ 33

The point is…you’ve never had such a blanket elitist background regarding the top people in the country the way it would be if the Tories were to win the next elections. Not in such an overwhelming way.

Cameron’s must surely be the first Tory shadow cabinet in which 12 or 13 members attended comprehensive schools. So it’s hardly setting records for elitism.

Besides, why does going to an expensive private school makes David Cameron any more out of touch than Alastair Darling, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, Ruth Kelly or any of the rest of the expensively educated Labour lot?

Always funny to watch the trolls tell us how poor their masters are.

Priceless.

Sally

What I find rib-ticklingly funny is how every weirdo blog pursues its own obsessions.

While Lib Con is banging on about Cameron being ‘a scion of the aristocracy’, over at Stormfront they’re getting over excited about Dave’s Jewish antecedents – quoting this from the Times:

David Cameron could be a direct descendant of Moses, a Jewish scholar has suggested.

Mr Cameron’s great-great-grandfather, Emile Levita, arrived in Britain from Germany in the 1850s and rose swiftly in the world of commerce…

This is not true – an easy life at Eton does not protect you from psychologically challenging events which can have a major impact on character and viewpoint.

didn’t mickey howerd have a dig at tony blair for his education?
‘This grammar school boy not taking lessons from the public school boy’ (or summuts.) – please correct me as i know i’m wrong in detail.