Bourgeois guilt

You can 'aspire', but don't you dare achieve

...(the new-style class war) is seriously flawed even in Gordon Brown's own terms. In modern Britain, most of the people whom Mr Brown calls the "privileged" are just those who were once aspirational and who, through hard work, talent, and sometimes self-sacrifice, made their wishes come true. In other words, they are precisely the sort of people with whom he and his alter ego Ed Balls are supposed to sympathise.

Of course, there are still a small number of players who win the lottery of life by virtue of their birth – and it is David Cameron and George Osborne's political liability to be among them – but the huge majority of those fortunate enough now to be highly educated, highly paid and professionally influential got where they are by some combination of merit, industriousness and, most important, positive attitude.