When I left school and met for the first time that strange breed of people who might be best described as people who did not go to my school, I was shaken. These were people who used words like wicked and mate without joking and who understood none of the usual cultural signifiers – so that when I referred to the Lucas Reunion or 'the sort of person who stands on the steps at the back of the school' they had no idea what I was talking about.
What's more, they would not accept that my way of talking is simply The Globally-recognised Natural Language of Man spoken in the Normal Accent. It is the way that God spoke when once He walked among us and it is the language in which He will proclaim His judgment.
I soon realised that these people were too stubborn to be taught the correct way of things and I set about trying to justify myself to them. Chiefly, this meant that when I was drunk I would begin to talk about schools – your school, my school – and also why all this meant that I am "not actually that posh".
In the mornings after these bouts of misrepresentation and pontificating I would feel an unbearable shame. It felt as if a demon had reversed the usual progress of fecal matter through my body, transfiguring it into terrible words and letting those words issue noxiously from my idiotic mouth.
This happened so many times I can't remember but gradually I mastered the demon and, with considerable effort, I banished him. I would still talk embarrassing nonsense shite when drunk but not about schools and not about class.
Many years passed. I remained always vigilant, fearing his return. But he did not return and I began at last to form a shaky understanding with these people who did not go to my school: a little wool for some corn; they taught me their names for the sky and the clouds and for the rain that falls with the seventh moon; I showed them a compass and demonstrated gunpowder.
And then the demon returned. He has visited twice in the last month and I felt as wretched as ever I did in those early days.
The demon's return has coincided with the re-emergence of the rhetoric of class war in British politics kicked off in awkward and jowly fashion by Gordon Brown and his "playing fields of Eton" jibe. Over the past fortnight we have been given the chance to see British politicians squirming and being forced to give protracted defences of their background in an effort to demonstrate that they are not that posh.
It is thus that I have come to realise that the business of justifying your privileged background is an essential skill that must be learned by all members of the governing class. It may be torturous and there may be a great shame to be felt in doing it but in the democratic age the old elites cannot expect to remain in power any other way. The only shame is in doing it badly: the demon is not laughing at you; he is admonishing you.
Ed Vaizey MP is an unrivalled expert at this game; in his deft hands it becomes an art form. He was titled from birth, attended a major public school and then Oxford. He is, in other words, as posh as it is possible to be and still be able to stand unassisted. And yet here he is in this video sitting down and making a convincing argument that, despite all this, he is not that posh.
He was not always such a master: I remember that the "About Ed Vaizey" section of his website used to make clumsy reference to his having attended a state primary school.
American politicians do this better than anybody else. Not only have they convinced their electorate that they are not posh, they have convinced them that they live in a classless meritocracy. George W Bush managed two terms as president regarded as a humble everyman despite being descended from vampires and educated at a school at the centre of the Earth run by Freemasons.
