Raver Rayner makes a good point

Inadvertently, I hasten to add. Deputy PM Angela Rayner would be unable to make any good points deliberately – such an ability isn’t in her intellectual make-up.

The point I have in mind was made after videos of Angie dancing at 4 AM in Ibiza had caused quite a stir.

Some spoilsport reactionaries questioned whether an Ibiza rave is a proper environment for a Secretary of State to display her dancing skills. Words like ‘dignity of office’ crossed a few lips, but Angie brushed them aside.

“Yes I’m working class,” she explained proudly. “I like a dance, I like dance music.”

This calls for at least two comments. The first one is less serious: Angie seems to believe that only working-class people like to dance.

Anyone who has ever attended, seen or read about an aristocratic ball will know that this is simply untrue. Choreographic displays aren’t the privilege of any particular group, far from it. It’s just that some people may dance gavottes and mazurkas, others choose tangos and foxtrots, and Angie prefers mimicking various approximations to coital gyrations.

Some social divides are indeed observable there. Or are these divides really social?

This brings us to the good point Raver Rayner made, albeit inadvertently. She always describes herself as working class, but what does the term mean?

Marx, the shining light of Angie’s world view, defined classes in economic terms (their relation to “the means of production”), dividing people into oppressive haves and oppressed have-nots, and identifying struggle between them as the principal social dynamic.

(Let’s remark parenthetically that Marx didn’t really originate that view. It had been wafting in the air since the early days of the Enlightenment, and Giambattista Vico, to name one thinker, had enunciated it 200 years before Marx.)

On that criterion, Angie isn’t working class. Even assuming she doesn’t fiddle her expenses, her government salary alone puts her firmly into the middle class. Since she nevertheless identifies (dread word) as working class, she clearly isn’t talking about money.

What then? It’s true that Angie’s background isn’t normally associated with the upper reaches of society. She grew up on a council estate, left school at 16 after getting pregnant and has never acquired any educational qualifications other than some training in social care.

But surely what matters isn’t where one begins but where one ends up? I know some erudite and refined people whose beginnings, minus a teenage pregnancy, were as humble as Angie’s. Yet, as they moved through life, they acquired the trappings of the cultured elite, rather than, like Angie, a collage of tattoos specifying their party affiliation.

The closer we look at the issue Raver Rayner touched upon, the more we realise that the only definition of class making sense these days must be based not on economics but on culture. This points at a paradox that brings into question many traditional notions of political taxonomies, specifically the difference between the conservative right and socialist left.

Conservatives are supposed to renounce change and devote tireless efforts to preserving ossified social and economic structures. Socialists, on the other hand, are inveterate progressives. Along with Marx and Darwin they believe in steady meliorative change: things continuously evolving from primitive to complex, from small to big, from bad to good.

However, when it comes to the touchy issue of class, it’s conservatives who believe in upward mobility, social, economic and cultural. Socialists like Angie, on the other hand, insist that one stays for ever in the class of one’s birth. It’s as if class were coded into one’s DNA, along with sex, height and the colour of eyes.

It’s obvious to anyone that, for all the clamps socialists love to apply to the economy, it’s possible for an originally poor person to become rich through industry and enterprise. If that’s the case, then, for a person to get permanently frozen into the same class, it’s culture that has to be held as immutable.

It’s tasteless to be either ashamed or proud of one’s roots, just as it’s silly to be ashamed or proud of one’s hazel eyes. Where or to whom we are born is beyond our control. But living over four decades (Angie is 44) without elevating herself beyond the culture of tattooed raves is indeed something to be ashamed of — and it’s definitely not something to be proud of.

When one finishes in the same place where one started, one has remained immobile. Culturally, one has been running in place, if at all. I’d define such a life as misspent, but Raver Rayner must have different ideas. She likes her cultural savagery and has assiduously cultivated it over a lifetime.

This isn’t just a personal idiosyncrasy. Such is the zeitgeist that Angie has inhaled deeply and filled her lungs with. And every gust must have told her that in matters cultural it’s not upward but downward mobility that’s laudable.

If you compare her to our former chancellor, George Osborne, his social background is the opposite of Raver Rayner’s. A scion of a wallpaper magnate, he had every privilege England can offer: prep schools, St Paul’s, Oxford, the lot. And yet, when asked about his musical tastes, George instantly cited… no, you’re wrong, not Palestrina and Bach. His professed musical preference was a sub-proletarian rap group.

He might have said it just to come across as prolier than thou, but that’s an even stronger indication of where the zeitgeist is blowing. Its squalls send people plummeting to the flinty cultural ground, rather than soaring to the heights of Palestrina or Bach.

“I take my job really seriously and what I do… you’ve got to have downtime as well. Everybody has to have downtime,” says Raver Rayner.

Fair enough. But the kind of downtime she chooses bodes badly for the job she does, however seriously she takes it.

It used to be taken for granted that leaders of Western countries had to be part of Western culture. That requirement has evidently fallen by the wayside, and the consequences are there for all to see.