There really is nothing more ghastly than a Tory MP calling a policeman a pleb – except, perhaps, people who jostle to get 50% off a telly.  Have I got that right? That many of the same people who deemed Andrew Mitchell poisonously patrician seem perfectly able to sneer at people taking advantage of a Black Friday shopping bargain attests to the eternally impenetrable mysteries of our class system – and that’s before we even chuck a high court judge into the mix.  “He is not the sort of man,” opined Mr Justice Mitting of Mitchell’s nemesis PC Rowland, “who had the wit, the imagination … to invent in the spur of the moment what a senior cabinet minister would have said to him.” You know what that sounds like? Judicialese for pleb. I’m not so much reading between m’lud’s lines, there, as simply reading his lines. Certainly, his verdict has been something to be snorted at with laughter by many sworn enemies of the type of snobbery Mitchell was found to have exhibited. If PC Rowland did not “learn [his] fucking place” after Mr Mitchell ordered him to, Mr Justice Mitting has certainly brought him up to speed now.  You have to be a judge to get away with it, as far as I can make out, or someone quoting a judge – I think a Queen’s counsel might struggle. Let’s see how it sounds: “You are not the sort of cabbie to have had the wit or the imagination to come up with a better route between Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge than that preferred by a former cabinet minister.” Then again, maybe David Mellor would have got away with that one if his cab driver had prefaced it with a remark about the size of flatscreen he was planning to grab on Black Friday. (And obviously a lot depends on how much traffic there was on the Embankment.)  Actually, I’m going to have to lay it on the line here: I’m confused. It’s been a hell of a week for the British class system. As Tony Blair once wibbled so madly: the kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again.  But where will they settle? Where? Creating diversionary class rows is fast becoming our last great manufacturing industry. And as real inequality becomes more entrenched, these weekly rows seem more of a displacement activity than ever. So establishing the rules of the game isn’t the greatest challenge facing us today – but it increasingly seems much, much easier to talk about than those challenges.  Fourteen years after John Major’s classless society was supposed to have come to pass, all people in public life are but one step away from the sort of class-based faux pas that will eventually make them a shoo-in for the redemptive possibilities of I’m A Celeb 2016, where their campmates could include Mitchell, PC Rowland, Emily Thornberry, the serially class-demonised Tulisa Contostavlos, her sometime nemesis Mazher Mahmood, and Mellor’s cabbie.  If Ant and Dec have had enough by then, I would like to see the show presented by social mobility tsar Alan Milburn. Idea for a task: the Downton Prison Experiment, in which PC Rowland, the cabbie and Tulisa are the above-stairs overlords of Mahmood, Mitchell and Mellor. Will their innate working-class nobility translate into benevolent paternalism, or will it take two days before it descends into mindless patrician violence and producers have to step in? Text YOB to 80531 or SNOB to 80532.  (Incidentally, I know it’s not relevant, but I wish to thank the encyclopaedically hilarious Craig Brown for quoting a forgotten passage from Edwina Currie’s forgotten diaries this week. “I will have a crack at the leadership as soon as I can,” writes Edwina in 1988. “I look at rivals like David Mellor and I like me better.” It feels too sledgehammer-like to remark that humour is tragedy plus time. But you can’t ignore the fact that this week found David failing to best a London cabbie and Edwina taking lectures in moral philosophy from a former Playboy bunny in the I’m A Celeb jungle.)  For now, though, guidelines on the vagaries of class attitudes seem dangerously vague. Back in 1955, there was Nancy Mitford’s essay to make sense of the times. In The English Aristocracy, Mitford took a romp through the idea of U and non-U speech, dividing the upper and middle classes so affectlessly that, in Britain, her words could only inspire what social historians often describe as a fevered or anxious national debate. Whether or not they worried about little else on 1950s Teesside is itself a matter of debate: but perhaps we can all agree that we are far from having resolved such ineffably important matters 60 years on.  It being 2014, though, we can at least crowdsource the new rules of class, so I must state that what follows is merely an attempt to get the ball rolling with a few simple examples culled from this last week .  And so: is Mellor’s “do you know who I am?” shtick U or non-U? I hope you will agree it is very much non-U. Anyone inquiring “do you know who I am?” is effectively asking: “Do you know who I was?” Meanwhile, as far as Black Friday goes, it looks open and shut. Talking about Black Friday – whether on air, in print, or in online comments – is decidedly U. In fact, the mere act of not shopping on the day elevates one to a position of innate U-ness. No one takes advantage of Black Friday – they are taken advantage of by it. They are non-U. And may I reiterate that quoting a snooty high court judge with a giggle is absolutely U. But if you tweeted a picture of Mitting in his wig and robes, don’t for God’s sake append a Thornberryian #imagefromthehighcourt.  Over to you now – but you have to say, what a very classy country we are. The cabinet minister versus the copper, the lawyer versus the black cab driver, the Labour law luvvie versus the person who prefers the back of an England flag to a window – with the sole exception of the journalist versus the estate agent, these have to be the least appealing possible ties in public life. As a friend muttered of the Mellor contretemps this week: “God, it really is that 1986 Argentina-Germany World Cup final, isn’t it?”
Marina Hyde: Andrew Mitchell, David Mellor and even the judge may be snobs. But the real battle is inequality