Cameron and clegg who is more upper crust

This Cameron and Clegg, he is the same person, no? They are both, how you say, posh? Even the hair is similar. David Cameron is Eton-Oxford-country- clubby-cutglass-shooting party sort of posh, whereas Nick Clegg is Westminster-Cambridge- metropolitan-foreign-glottalstop-trustfund sort of posh. Clegg spent many years in the endless halls of Brussels and Strasbourg, working for the European commission and then as an MEP. A privileged environment that may have been, but above all a bourgeois one, and one whose elites were meritocratic and technocratic, not aristocratic.

Also deeply dull-sounding. The recollection that Geoff Hoon was an MEP before he entered parliament somehow makes that role seem almost devoid of any joy or life. Clegg may number some exotically titled Europeans among his ancestors, but these do not have the cachet of Cameron's noble links "continental titles are two a penny," as my old history teacher, the late RW Harris , remarked when a classmate was foolish enough to reveal that he was, in fact, a Polish count.

Just as there was with Harold Macmillan, there is the whiff of the grouse moor about "Dave"; indeed, there is a photograph of him at a shooting party weekend in James Hanning and Francis Elliott's masterly biography of the Tory leader.

Both his mother and his wife are the daughters of baronets, while his mother-in-law is a viscountess. And true to Shaw's observation that "it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him", the two party leaders are also separated by accent. Cameron's tones may have been " considerably fruitier and more patrician " when he was a student, according to his Oxford contemporary James Delingpole, but he still sounds like a man whose character was formed on the "playing field of Eton" rather to his credit, I think.

We could get liberal together! David Cameron and Nick Clegg did not meet in a lonely hearts ad, but today they flirted like mad. It was an extraordinary public coming together of two men who have long been aware of the risks of excessive compatibility. Quite when Clegg and Cameron first encountered each other is not known: Clegg, a boarder at Westminster school, would not have been a natural associate of Cameron, at Eton.

But as young men, both moved in the same sort of circles. Clegg spent a winter as a ski instructor; Cameron played bridge and tennis: the pastimes of the privately educated upper-middle class. His wife, Miriam Gonzalez Duarte, a successful international lawyer, is the daughter of a Spanish senator. The concept of social class is highly controversial in the UK. While traditional class boundaries have, to a large extent, blurred in the past few decades, it remains a highly delicate issue.

The son of a Scottish clergyman, Brown has frequently drawn attention to his middle class family roots - as have the British media.

Vote Labour, or else.