Networked from birth

Among most high-ranking politicians, however, zeroing in on the Tories' high-end backgrounds is seemingly considered impolite. From the Labour benches, you hear occasional attempts to make it an issue, but among ministers, an ingrained fear of the whiff of class war tends to even rule out the odd joke (in his increasingly dire encounters with Cameron, for example, Gordon Brown has not once even hinted at their very different experiences of secondary education). In Downing Street, word has reportedly gone out from Brown's chief of staff, Stephen Carter, that attempting to make political capital out of leading Tories' privileged pedigrees is deeply unacceptable.