Will attacking Etonians win or lose votes?
Could Brown’s toff-bashing quip turn-off middle England?
John Rentoul makes a good point about one aspect of Brown’s PMQ’s performance on his Independent blog:-
“…..there was one line that was too good to use. Brown invoked the name of Zac Goldsmith, the dormantly non-dom Conservative candidate, and said that David Cameron’s inheritance tax cut seemed like something “dreamt up on the playing fields of Eton”. .Having a go at Cameron’s school, chosen for him by his parents: Not Going to Work.
It is a core vote strategy that may appeal to people that would vote Labour anyway; Middle England won’t like it.”
Tony Blair won three successive victories for Labour because he made his party “safe” for the middle classes in “middle England” to vote for his party.
Brown was always going to find that difficult to follow that and Rentoul’s right – making silly class-war type comments could go down like a lead balloon with this key large segment of the electorate.
It’s not in Labour parts of Scotland where the general election will be decided but in the small to medium size towns of England that were picked up by Blair in the 1997 landslide.
If the Prime Minister is to prevent a Tory majority then he’s got to stop the seepage of support in England. Maybe in bald general election terms it was Cameron’s PMQs after all?
HAT-tip ScottP