I’M not a champagne socialist, though I suppose I might be if I could afford champagne.

As it is, I’m a Cumberland Ale socialist. But Angela Rayner is a champagne socialist, if Dominic Raab is to be believed.

That is how he described her last week. The deputy prime minister faced the deputy Labour leader at Prime Minister’s Questions while their respective leaders were absent.

Ms Rayner was taking Mr Raab to task over his comment that people who use food banks 'simply have a cashflow problem'.

In response, he said she had 'flip-flopped' over her attitude to the rail strikes, and said: “Where was she when the comrades were on the picket line last Thursday?

“She was at the Glyndebourne music festival sipping champagne, listening to opera. Champagne socialism is back in the Labour party.”

I’m firmly of the belief that everyone, whatever their background, should have the right to enjoy opera or anything that gets described as “high culture ”.

If that makes me a socialist – champagne or otherwise – then I’m happy with the label. I hope that plenty of people who don’t accept the label think the same way.

Indeed I’m not sure there really is an easy distinction to draw between high culture and low culture, and less sure that there should be. I’m happy if Dominic Raab wants to play darts with Jacob Rees-Mogg.

But Mr Raab has no business sneering at Ms Rayner.

She happened to grow up on a poor council estate in Stockport, and she has as much right to go to the opera as anyone else. Indeed the Conservatives might even have celebrated the fact as an example of 'levelling up' or of the 'classless society' John Major talked about, if either of these had been anything more than empty slogans.

But Mr Raab would of course never have denounced a Tory MP for going to the opera. The subtext seemed to be that the opera is not for the likes of her.

It could be worth pointing out that a ticket for Glyndebourne cost £62. That’s less than you’d pay for some Premier League football matches or West End shows. A ticket for Glastonbury cost £280.

We could also bear in mind that the story of the opera she saw, The Marriage of Figaro, is of 'a clever, working-class woman who gets the better of a posh but dim-witted villain'. Any similarities with real events – or contemporary British politicians – are purely coincidental.

When it comes to mention of opera, Dominic Raab isn’t the first Conservative politician to display some ugly snobbery.

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George Young was housing minister back in the Major era. In an interview in June 1991 he described homeless people as “the people you step over when you leave the opera”.

Mr Raab, like Mr Young, before him were undermining all the best efforts of some Tories in recent years to appear less out of touch and more like the rest of us.

It never used to be like that. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s they were led by two people – Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher – who had both felt the need to assume phoney posh accents in order to get ahead.

Then it changed. By 1992 the Daily Mail was approvingly calling John Major the 'boy from Brixton', and five years later William Hague appeared at the Notting Hill carnival wearing a baseball cap.

David Cameron said some friends called him Dave and claimed to be an Aston Villa fan, even if he confused them with West Ham. And he was careful to make little mention of the sport he took part in, fox hunting.

Of course all politicians like to appear blokey. Anthony Wedgwood Benn became Tony Benn. Tony Blair was pictured carrying his guitar into Downing Street.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Nigel Farage doesn’t even drink or smoke, and the pint of bitter and cigarette are all part of an attempt to look like Mr Everyman, not the commodities trader in the City of London he originally was.

But it’s more important for Conservatives, as the party of money and the aristocracy, with a cabinet full of millionaire old Etonians, to try not to seem privileged or aloof.

And then the snobbery they’ve been trying to conceal creeps out – sneering at working-class opera goers, or those who are sleeping in the streets near opera houses as a direct result of their refusal to build public housing.

They’ve lost the previously 'red wall' seat of Wakefield back to Labour. Raab’s attitude won’t help them retain any of the others.

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