The nexus of characteristics by which it is measured grow each time the undesirable come within striking distance of mastering the last set of criteria. Accent, language, education, manners and taste continue to count.Those with wads of dosh can never buy armour against what Lord Annan, the former BBC director general, called the invincible British defect – snobbery. It reaches to all levels of society, as when Lord Chartres called the Duchess of York “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar” or The Daily Telegraph leader on her divorce, which described her as “irredeemably unroyal”. Class is not contingent, you see, it is integral, and those who do not possess the right kind of it are literally beyond redemption.By contrast there is nothing so slippery about the notion of the working class. It speaks of a dying era in which there resided in the common people notions of community, roots, and pre-relativist values. It is a world which a middle-class, plagued by over-work or unemployment, enforced mobility and contract culture, can only yearn for. It is a romantic illusion, of course, but it enables us to be middle class in our pockets and working class in our hearts.

How very post-modern.Leading article,Review, page 3Dinner, Tea or Supper?Is your house called:1 Toad Hall?2 Dungangbangin?3 Selvedon Manor?Do you refer to your evening meal as:1 “My dinner”?2 “Me tea”?3. “M’supper”?You are watching Les Dennis’s Family Fortunes on Saturday evening The compere asks for Six Things You’d Find in a Kitchen Top of your list is:1 An asparagus kettle?2 A bottle of HP sauce?3. Once it resided in blood and family and expressed itself in things like the school you went to or the social circles you move in. But over the years it became diluted by the amount you were worth, the property you lived in, the job you did. Now government statisticians will be adding in other indicators – your perks, pension, private healthcare and level of job security.Which, perhaps, explains why in yesterday’s poll only 45 per cent of the population felt that the Blair government was committed to all classes equally. A greater number (47 per cent) believed it was more committed to one social class – and of those only 27 per cent saw that commitment as being to Labour’s traditional constituency, the working class.

Some 71 per cent felt Tony Blair was set on favouring the middle and upper classes.For all John Major’s hopes for a classless society the signs are that class in Britain is as much of an issue as it was in the days when the writer Nancy Mitford produced her “U and non-U” guide to socially acceptable language.It is just that class becomes ever more subtle. All of which should produce a good dose of controversy when the statistics are eventually published).So what are we to make of the apparent contradiction between all these steadily emerging trends and the new poll finding that most people think of themselves as working class?Class is a difficult concept. It was “codswallop” to suggest otherwise.Government statisticians seemed to agree. They charted a change in demographic profiles which revealed that, in the 1970s only a third of the population fell into the category of middle class Today it is more than half. They are now reclassifying us all from the six grades used since 1921 – A, B, C1 and C2, D and E – and are preparing 17 new categories to be in operation by the next census in 2001 (Nurses are up and plumbers are down Lawyers and doctors are on a par with teachers and police.

It doesn’t seem that long since we were being told we were all middle class. Indeed, it was on the very same BBC programme only a while back that the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was stoutly maintaining that, despite his background as an able-bodied seaman and stalwart trade unionist, he was self-evidently now a member of the bourgeoisie, on the basis, presumably, of his hefty ministerial salary and Jaguar.Around the same time Prince Edward declared that the British class system was dead. Some 55 per cent reckon they are working class compared with 41 per cent who think of themselves as middle class – with a meagre one per cent laying claim to membership of the upper classes.
But hang on. CAN YOU keep up? Now it transpires that most of us are working class.