Why don’t we want a government that is on the side of ‘ordinary people’?

It’s often the peripheral that catches the eye, gets you thinking. My newspaper’s fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Liverpool this week, featuring an analysis of Labour’s standing by the Times’s Populus pollster, Rick Nye, was really centred on the immediate: what was the electorate’s perception of Ed Miliband-led Labour? Our guest, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, was there to discuss this with the audience. But a rather different question leapt at me from Mr Nye’s presentation: one of the very few polling questions to which respondents were returning consistently and overwhelmingly pro-Labour replies. It started:

‘Regardless of which party you would vote for, please say if you think each word or phrase is true or not true of the Labour/Conservative/Liberal Democrat party?

…after which followed a series of seven attributes, in not one of which Labour’s score reached anything like 50 per cent, except for this: ‘For ordinary people, not just the better-off’.