Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell today told the Sunday Telegraph that Labour's election campaign must not be fought by attacking candidates' social backgrounds, in an implicit criticism of the prime minister's recent scathing comments about David Cameron's privileged Eton background.
"You know, there really is nothing much to be gained from close scrutiny of the social class of Britain's parliamentarians," insisted the old girl of the exclusive St Margaret's School for Girls, Aberdeen. "Frankly, I think it's just jealousy. This sort of thing really only matters in the impoverished imaginations of silly little proletarian oiks with massive chips on their shoulders who have nothing to offer the British public."
"No offence, Gordon," she added. "It's not your fault you didn't have the advantage of a good, rounded education."
Justice Secretary Jack Straw, an alumnus of fee-paying Brentwood School, has already played down the idea that the privately-educated may somehow have little in common with the majority of British voters.
"Believe me, I know better than anybody what it's like to struggle to keep up in the rat-race," he insisted. "In a competitive streaming system, getting a 'Must try harder' for Latin was a clear shot across the bows which left me in no doubt that I could all too easily wind up as one of life's losers in class IIIC, at the very bottom of the heap."
58 other Labour MPs whose comfortable-perhaps-but-hardly-rich parents kindly saved the taxpayer a few bob by sending them to public schools were quick to echo Ms Jowell's egalitarian sentiments, in a joint statement sent to the Nev Filter (Old Plymothian & Mannameadian '74-'81).
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