There is no snob like a Labour snob – and Keir Starmer is no exception

Our thoughts must now turn to Labour. It is instructive to remember that there is no snob like a Labour snob. When my father, Woodrow Wyatt, was the Labour MP for a northern constituency he would give regular soirées for the local miners and their wives. With unerring snobisme, the miners insisted that everyone wore black tie, and expressed grave disappointment if the wine served was not claret.

Earlier, while at Oxford, my father became friendly with the future Labour Cabinet minister Tony Crosland, a man of great dash and glamour, who on one occasion, threw guests out of his rooms for not coming to a dinner formally dressed.

You would think that panjandrums of the Labour Party would be against the environment in which God had placed them, and thus pathologically opposed to its conventions, as well as indifferent patriots. Historically, this is not so with Labourites, however. Even Guy Burgess, a hard-line Left-winger who, famously, turned out to be a Soviet agent, once punched a man in a nightclub for refusing to stand when the band played the national anthem.

Keir Starmer, one feels, differs little on essentials. It is inevitable that an incoming Labour government will remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but this will be a piece of worthless meat to throw at the party’s more covetous dogs, and Starmer’s heart won’t really be in it

Besides, it is increasingly impossible, as even many Tories would agree, to defend the hereditary principle in the 21st century. Who is to say that a future Conservative government, under, say, Kemi Badenoch, would not do the same? It would be a reform in the Thatcherite tradition.

In a modern democracy there is always a strong capacity for envy. In the face of another person’s good fortune, the average human being feels not inertia but extreme distress, as they do at a rich man having more money than they, or their neighbour having a better looking and more intelligent partner or a larger house.

Most of us would like to be hereditary peers, and to live in the grandeur we mistakenly imagine they inhabit (an earl of my acquaintance, for instance, resides in a leaky semi south of the river), and thus in theory resent their continuing existence as lawmakers. If you pump envy out of democracy, you pump it of its lifeblood. But this does not mean that Starmer is a class warrior. He does not seem to suffer from envy and probably has little time and feels little sympathy for people who do. I doubt he has a desire to punish those with a superior capacity for happiness or bring them down a peg or two just for the sake of it.

According to friends of mine who know him well, he appears to be a man of serene spirit and a steady freedom from moral indignation. He fights in the manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, as opposed to brawling like a drunken longshoreman.

The present Labour leader is not so dissimilar from those northern miners when it comes to a dash of healthy and civilised snobbery.

It is telling that Starmer’s intimates are not the revolutionary sons of toil, but sprout from the ancient soil of some of the most elevated families in the land.

When Labour takes power, I have been told, Starmer intends to appoint as Lord Chancellor his good friend Edward Fitzgerald KC. Edward is also a friend of mine. He also happens to be the son-in-law of Lady Antonia Fraser, the widow of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter and member of the great and aristocratic Whig dynasty.

The Frasers are not plutocrats who, in a democracy like ours, tend to be mistaken for aristocrats. Instead, the Frasers have the clean tradition of a true aristocracy: which means culture, public spirit, honesty and courage. They stand under bond of obligation to the state and have behind them a century of public duty.

For me, it is encouraging that Sir Keir Starmer prizes excellence and has no aversion to salons, as well as saloons. Lady Antonia’s parties are some of the best in London. No one political can function properly without a salon, which is where the Tory party lags lamentably behind Labour at the moment.

I once wrote that the teetotal Rishi Sunak lacked “pintability”, that bonhomous lure that makes the voter believe they could spend an agreeable evening with him, sinking pints and shooting the conversational breeze. The Frasers often favour champagne over beer, though they like both, but that is no obstacle to seeming democratic these days.

One of the silliest things that David Cameron did as prime minister was to ban his ministers from being seen drinking champagne in public. He failed to realise that we like our leaders to appear to know what the man on the street is thinking, but not to take us for fools and pose as the man on the street himself.

Snobbery has gained a poor name, but it means, in fact, a preference for the best.

If Starmer is in the great tradition of Labour snobs, it ought to provide some comfort to nervous voters.