I’ve never had a problem with billionaires until now. I expect them to have secret lairs only accessible by helicopter off the coast of Turkey and for mediocre lookers like Elon Musk to punch above their weight in the dating game. I even expect them to blast through our fragile atmosphere for a weightless ten minute ride on a home made space ship funded by the profits from Uber Eats. And yet during this particular season of treason and plot, I find myself sympathising with those who took to the barricades during the revolution in France. We expect excess at The Palace of Versailles. It is only when the aristocracy sneers “Let them eat cake”, that the price of a guillotine rockets.

“Stop quilting the earth in an invisible blanket of CO2,” was the message from The Garrick Club last week, where Boris had flown in on his private jet in time for a feast of peasants and port. The Doomsday clock is about to strike midnight, he warned, appropriating a metaphor from the Cuban missile crisis. That actually was a crisis. Parents packed their kids off to school not knowing if, by afternoon break, all would be vaporised in a mushroom cloud. If there is a global temperature crisis, then we struggle to see it through the very visible blanket of hyperbole.

The purpose of a Conservative government adopting the manifesto of The Green Party, which took a paltry 2.7% of the votes in the 2019 General Election, is to signal to the public its utter irrelevance. Public office serves as a cheap internship during which politicians get to flaunt their credentials to a global oligarchy consisting of premiers, presidents, princes and Silicone Valley billionaires whose reach transcends archaic notions of sovereignty and whose power is not subject to the whim of the demos. Look no further than Nick Clegg to see how public opprobrium is no barrier to a meteoric rise. 

Of course, there is a risk when elected leaders burn up the air miles to feast with the Bacchanalian elite, whilst simultaneously preaching that climate armageddon will only be avoided if the hoi polloi ditch their cars and, once a week, take the peasant wagon to Lidl. When “let them eat cake” becomes “let them eat insects and plant based mash”, there is a heightened risk that the working class will take to the streets to sing One Day More with a spare rib in one hand a pitchfork in the other. And it is the working class which poses the threat as the middle class can afford to make a virtue of its suffering. Trading in the Discovery Sport for a hybrid Mini Countryman and a bag full of social bragging rights is substantially different from having to choose between putting on the heating and a week on the beer in Faliraki.

In anticipation of the backlash the government has turned a blind eye to the politicisation of the police and is now recruiting exclusively from the middle class. Why else do you suppose a career in the police is now only open to those with a degree? The ruling class needs a woke paramilitary vanguard, well versed in the etiquette of uncritical obedience, for when the people revolt.

When the police embrace a political cause, there is no expression of support that is too extreme. Humberside Police endorsed a lunatic with connections to organised crime who once told Julie Burchill, a writer of Jewish heritage, that Hitler had the right idea. And the national lead on Hate Crime, Paul Giannasi OBE, recently introduced the concept of laudable hate, provided it serves middle class preoccupations such as gender identity or preserving the tundra.

The ruling class needs a woke paramilitary vanguard for when the people revolt

And then there is the obscene spectacle of politically sponsored riot shields being paraded by the police through the streets of Leicester. We are meant to swallow the lie that this is a benign display of support for a marginalised community when, in reality, it is an emblematic reminder to the working class to Remember The Battle Of Orgreave. On the 18th of June, 1984, ordinary working people lent their support to the picketing miners and were met with a baton charge, preceded by the pounding of riot shields, in scenes reminiscent of Zulu. Lest they forget. 

The crimes of the woke middle class, where they are prosecuted at all, come with the safety net of a judiciary that is also in on the racket. When six XR zealots found themselves in the dock for progressing the cause of Greta Thunberg by taking hammers to the glass frontage of Shell’s London Headquarters, Judge Gregory Perrin advised that their actions had no defence at law. Nevertheless, he offered gratitude for the care and diligence taken by the jury when it returned a not-guilty verdict. Last week, three activists were found guilty of criminal damage for graffitiing “Lies, lies, lies” on the Westminster Office of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to its sin of climate scepticism. Before being slammed with peppercorn fines, the criminals — Clare, Jessica and Rupert — were praised by the bench for their openness and honesty. It is yet to be seen whether similar leeway will be afforded to working class criminals who, in pursuit of Net Zero, begin half inching insulation from Travis Perkins.