2012 REVIEW: CLASS WAR

That this belief turned out to be wide of the mark is, in one sense, neither here nor there. What mattered was that Cameron believed he needed a conduit, an individual raised on a Basildon housing scheme, to the people he meant to govern. In the argot of the Westminster bubble, Cameron felt "vulnerable on class".

Invulnerable might be a better way to put it. Britain's class system had done the Prime Minister and his colleagues no harm at all. They were, as they remain, overwhelmingly of the 7% – that fraction given the best private educations money can buy. Their only fear is that the rest will catch on.

Only eight of the present Cabinet's 31 members went to state schools. Five attended grammars; four came from "mixed" educational establishments; and fully 14 were shaped in one of the mis-named public institutions. Cameron himself famously enjoyed Eton's pleasures. In May, an analysis by Wealth-X, the self-described "global ultra-high net worth prospecting, intelligence and wealth due diligence firm", put the collective private fortune of the Cabinet at £70 million.

That isn't the half of it. Roughly two-thirds of those at the heart of Government are millionaires. Of the 31, 20 attended one or other of the Oxbridge colleges. Cameron, William Hague (Foreign Secretary), Jeremy Hunt (health), Philip Hammond (defence), David Willetts (universities), and Danny Alexander (Treasury Chief Secretary) possess Oxford's ineffably silly PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) degree. But so, too, do Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, and the Labour leader's brother, David.

There is little room at the top. One child in every 14 has a private education and yet the schools involved provide 35% of all MPs. Oxbridge, with its eccentric entry criteria, gives us 30% of parliamentarians and Oxford alone takes credit (or otherwise) for 102 MPs. Just 13 schools in Britain have educated 10% of all sitting MPs. Eton College processes around 1300 pupils each year, yet there are 20 Old Etonians gracing the Commons.

Small wonder, then, that sooner or later a political radical would step forward to denounce this state of affairs. Back in May, Michael Gove, the firebrand concerned, said it was "morally indefensible" to allow parentage to dictate a young person's chances in life, or to ensure that the children of the poor stay poor.

Sardonically, this advocate of class war added: "It is remarkable how many positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated." Private schools, he said, were "handsomely represented" in the Supreme Court, the medical profession, universities, the media and business. Many cricketers, rugby players and Olympians were privately educated. The influence of inherited wealth was "in Hollywood, Broadway and on our TV screens".

Gove, sitting at the heart of Cameron's Cabinet and busily wrecking the English state school system, must have been taking notes from the Prime Minister. On the face of it, he was arguing for the restoration of the myth of meritocracy. In reality, he was attempting the trick essayed by Cameron in the hiring of Coulson. It amounted to a declaration: "We truly deplore the shameless and iniquitous system that put us where we are today. Honest."

Gove's ploy was undermined somewhat, when his colleague and chief whip, Andrew Mitchell (Rugby School and Cambridge) stood accused of swearing at Downing Street police officers. The stratagem came adrift when Chancellor George Osborne decided that we were all in this together against the poor. Gove's legitimacy took a knock, equally, as it became clear that social mobility has all but ceased to exist under a public-school government.

Give Gove some credit for gall, nevertheless. "We live," he said, "in a profoundly unequal society." Imagine that. He could have said that 2012 was the year in which everyone stopped pretending about class in Britain, whether it existed, or whether – the very idea became a nostalgic fantasy – it "mattered". Once again, class was everything.

Team Cameron fretted over the conclusions likely to be drawn by the 93% missing from the club, but in 2012 John Major's "classless society" became a political corpse. Inevitably, a report from the Smith Institute broke down the employment histories of MPs in the 2010 intake. It went like this: business, 19%; finance, 15%; law, 14%; media, 10%; lecturing and teaching, 12%. So how does a young person of common means and humble origins – their phrase – enter such professions, far less rise? Don't be silly.

In April of 2011, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched a campaign to improve social mobility and assault child poverty. He said it was the Coalition's "overriding mission" to make society fairer. He said, with his usual constipated desperation, that he wanted to end the culture in which opportunity was determined by "who you know". Then he admitted that his own internship at a Finnish bank had come through "family connections".

It's as funny, almost, as Cameron attempting to pass for "Dave". Funnier is the very idea of an elite, born to inherit, destined to rule. We've had the Oxbridge version in Britain for better than a century and a half. So how – there are no prizes – is Britain doing? It seems we have an elite whose best effort has involved presiding over relentless decline. Still they queue up for the expensive delusion that politics, philosophy and economics can be ticked off the career list in three brief years.

Ed Miliband, in his grisly conference speech, attempted to trump the Coalition's nonsense with some of his own. While a firestorm of benefits cuts were putting the 93% back in their place, Miliband proposed that we were all One Nation. The deceit must have sounded breathtaking to the embattled working class in Disraeli's day. Among the public-school media kids reporting the conference, the leader was accounted daring.

But what is class, anyway? Academics still scratch their heads. How do you weigh the housing scheme and the comprehensive school against the old-university degree and the utterly bourgeois profession? One way is to remember that Cameron and friends suffer no such problem. Another is to remember that ever-fewer members of the once-working class are even allowed to face the problem at the bleak end of 2012. Meritocracy, too, has gone. This is not an accident.

Class is money, how you got it, and how you use it. In this argument, Cameron and his chancellor are losing their inhibitions. The undeserving poor have been reinvented as markers of class, and of an unabashed belief in class, for accounting purposes. We are invited to join a lynch mob by individuals who cut tax bills for the super-rich. So: when they come after the poor, they come after all of us.

That last preposition could stand for any theory of class. It might even stand up as a thought for the season. We know who we are, and so do they. This was the year in which they prayed we wouldn't notice the difference.