David Davis should be in Cabinet – or at least in government

Class never quite goes away as an issue for the Tories, for the simple and sufficient reason that it matters. Lately it was Michael Gove stating the obvious, that the Prime Minister mixes mostly with people with backgrounds like his own…a perfectly human impulse, but not a good look, the Old Etonian coterie. Now David Davis has observed (on the radio) over the weekend, as John Major did last year, that it’s much harder than it was when he was growing up for a working class boy to get ahead in the world. Mr Davis is a product of a Tooting grammar school, a route that’s now closed, but it wasn’t just grammars that he was talking about, but social mobility generally.

It’s not the first time he’s given the government the benefit of his views on class. Last year, similarly, he observed after the local elections:

‘The fact is that if we want to win the next election, we have to break this impression of being privileged and out of touch.