To be sure, there are people in universities, and journalism, and other places who have a degree of power – but they are not as cohesive or as dominant as that view suggests. By prioritising the new graduate elite, as Jeremy Corbyn learned in 2019, Labour was left heavily dependent on voters who are simply too narrowly concentrated in the cities and university towns to win large majorities in a first-past-the-post system. The Telegraph has a report that links deaths to the junior doctors’ strike: “Deaths rise as junior doctors go on strike”. They are among the most likely to block, unfriend and insult anyone who exposes them to an alternative view.

As recent events in Scotland underline, pushing aggressively for policies such as the gender recognition reform bill (which, by December, only one in five voters supported and thought the Westminster government was wrong to block) can seriously backfire and have far-reaching consequences. So you would have to be pretty ignorant of the wider, well-known literature on the New Elite to think that what I’m arguing in Values, Voice and Virtue is particularly unique or outrageous.

There are several premises in Goodwin’s argumentation that, albeit not original, one would struggle to disagree with.

Over the past two decades, Labour has been seriously weakened by its decision to exclude the voices of working-class and non-graduate voters. assumes you do and pitches us straight into an aircraft hangar full of blinking new recruits, somewhere in Britain.

The Spectator magazine devoted its cover to the “new elite” and how “the woke aristocracy” is on a “march through the institutions”. The i has a report on disabled children: “Families plead for disabled children to get access to their own savings”. Goodwin has subsequently argued that the Conservative party had to make a choice between the traditionalists with their counter-revolution and the liberal cosmopolitans and their decades-long revolution, but failed to so. Working-class Brexit voters have deserted in droves, not mainly back to Labour but into a resentful abstention. Given all of that, it might seem bold to argue that it is the sneering cognoscenti who rule the roost.