The real victims of this snap election? The bankers’ wives

The people I feel most sorry for in the wake of Theresa May’s shock announcement are not moderate Labour MPs, nor even the pollsters, who really will be in trouble if they get another election wrong. No, it’s the bankers’ wives of west London. If the EU is going to be the No.1 issue in the campaign, and the Tories are standing on a pro-Brexit platform, how will the poor dears vote?

On the one hand, they were very, very angry about the outcome of the EU referendum and, even today, they’re not above buttonholing leavers at cocktail parties and giving them the hairdryer treatment. They regard David Cameron as criminally negligent —‘How could he let this happen?’ — and Theresa May as a ‘turncoat’. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I’ve ‘betrayed’ my children, although it’s hard for them to sustain the tone of moral indignation when, in the next breath, they talk about the ‘terrible uncertainty’ now afflicting their live-in housekeeper Agnieszka Kowalski.