by Aidan White
Posted: 28 September 2012
The one flaw in the life and culture of British society – the country’s historical obsession with class and social status – is the issue that may have undone the political career of Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP roundly condemned on all sides, even within the press, for his ill-judged rant against police outside Downing Street.
Mitchell may like to think of himself as a celebrity cyclist, wheeling along in the slipstream of London’s populist Mayor Boris Johnson, but he came unstuck for raging at officers, a police woman among them, who refused to open the gates to let him pedal up to No 10. He is alleged to have called them ‘plebs.’
This insult, more than his swearing, has opened up a fresh storm about the class division between Britain’s posh conservative government and the upper class it represents against, well, ‘plebs’ like the rest of us.