A different class of snob

‘Ah, beware of snobbery,’ said Cary Grant, who was surprisingly often the smartest guy in the room. ‘It is the unwelcome recognition of one’s own past failings.’

In Britain, the only place where true toffs abide and, let’s face it, the place where modern snobbery was most successfully codified, it is still a more powerful force than we like to acknowledge.

Brexit was a comedy of the thwarted snobbery of the right and left. A referendum was organised by a Remainer toff who assumed he would win because, well, he was a toff. He was, in the event, comprehensively defeated and deposed. Meanwhile, the even more fervently Remainer middle-class bien–pensants, who sincerely believed they spoke for the working classes and who said they wanted to hear their voice, turned out to be fabulously deluded when they did.

By doing the ‘wrong’ thing by the standards of their ‘superiors’, only the working classes left the stage with their dignity intact.