Stranded Gentry; When even the Tories reject candidates for being too

CLASS warriors everywhere will have been rejoicing recently at the news that the Conservative Party has rejected two female candidates for the mind-boggling reason that they are "too posh". And above the noise of cheering you may have detected the tinkling sound of silver spoons dropping out of mouths gone slack with surprise.

Gabrielle Howatson, alum of Cheltenham Ladies' College and Cambridge University, is one of those who has reason to bemoan her cut-glass accent: she believes her firm grasp of the Queen's English is the reason she was overlooked by Tory selection committees choosing candidates in the seats of Holborn and St Pancras, Cambridge and Brighton. "Someone said to me when I did not get a seat that they thought it was because I was too posh," she sniffed.

The wonderfully-named Annunziata Rees-Mogg shares Howatson's upper- crust pain. She wheeled out the same complaint when the Tory selection panel for South Thanet in Kent told her she was also "too posh" to stand there.

It appears, then, that public schoolboys and girls with an Oxbridge degree in one hand and a trust fund in the other are not as favoured as they once were. Indeed some would go further. Some claim that those whose vowels are come sharp and perfectly chiselled are being actively discriminated against and that the Tories' "too posh" snub is the final straw in a pervasive anti-toff bias.

"For a Conservative selection committee to say 'You're too posh' is an absurdity. That's like a Labour selection committee saying 'We don't want you because you are working class'," says playwright and novelist Julian Fellowes.

Fellowes - who scripted Robert Altman's upstairs-downstairs film Gosford Park and who has just published the self-explanatory Snobs - doesn't hold back when asked about an anti-posh bias.

"It is an absolutely intolerable thing that a whole section of the community may be dismissed," he says. "That is really the central horror of racism or any of these other bigot positions - you are not looking at who people are, but at what they are. And you are assuming you dislike them because they are Jewish, or because they are black, or because they have posh accents."

But compared with the Holocaust or apartheid, Fellowes does concede that the persecution of the posh is a relatively trifling matter. Yet he still describes the BBC as "vehemently anti-posh" and the "New Labour elite" as the greatest enemy of the upper classes.

"They see themselves as the proper aristocracy, and thoroughly resent this awful historical aristocracy imposed upon them," he says. "They have created this tide that the upper classes are stupid, that the upper classes are retrograde, that they are never prepared to take on the future, that they cling to what they know and that they are frightened by what they don't know, and therefore they are unfit for public office." And now it seems the Tory party is listening to the New Labour devil on its shoulder by slamming the once welcoming door in the face of the posh.

Fellowes also points the finger at the "politically-correct brigade" and the "suburban intelligentsia" for maintaining double standards when it comes to class.

"What I can't get over is if someone is called 'a Mick' in work, they are allowed to sue someone for (pounds) 400,000 because they have been depressed ever since. But if I wanted to sue because people made fun of people because they are posh, or fat, or bald - and I'm guilty on all three counts - why is that not alright?" he asks.

"Why is it alright to constantly insult the upper class, saying things like 'these stupid, thick, Hooray Henrys' which you see in print every day of your life? Why is that okay, but if you wrote that about the Italians you'd be up on a charge? The whole thing seems upside down."

Peregrine Worsthorne uses starker tones. The former Sunday Telegraph editor and author of In Defence Of Aristocracy, describes the anti-posh bias as "positively dangerous".

"The anti-elitist [stance] is a major scourge on contemporary society," he says. "It rules out so many people whose tradition was to go into public service. Now these people with much to contribute are being eliminated. No wonder our institutions are working so badly. The very people who used to run them are now banished. This is a serious problem for this country."

Worsthorne points out that just as the Tories are over- compensating and refusing candidates because of their cut-glass tones, so has society in general swung "dangerously the other way". Once upon a time, he says, "Old Etonians used to have an easy life" and were eased into the top jobs. "Now we've been taught that aristocracy is the work of the devil and democracy is the work of God. We've been brainwashed with this prejudice, that toffs must be kept at arm's length because they are unfit to hold public office."

This is a bitter blow. If posh people can't become Tory MPs, if they are held at arm's length and deemed unfit for public office, then what's left for them? Well, for the well-heeled with military inclinations, ex-Major Eric Joyce - now Labour MP for Falkirk West - says he can recommend the Household Division. "That's the area where you will find a significant proportion of people from very privileged backgrounds," he says. Even here, though, the Queen's English and received pronunciation (RP) no longer carry the authority they used to. "A polite accent makes you easy to understand first time, no doubt about it," he says. "But people with overtly strangulated accents are subjected to ridicule. And so they should be." So it seems that, as with the Tory party, there is such a thing as "too posh" for the military.