Hell hath no fury like a woman or a media mogul scorned

David Cameron & George Osborne Photo: Petar Kujundzic/AP

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/28/andrew-rawnsley-cameron-osborne-poshness

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/ Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." 

~ William Congreve in The Mourning Bride (1697)

Powerful people who once fell over each other to sing his praises now accuse David Cameron of "speaking for the few" and "vanity globe-trotting" as the economy stalls and Britons suffer harsh state spending cuts. "Not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don't know the price of milk" said a Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorries in her recent attack on the premier and finance minister, George Osborne, the heir to a baronetcy..."but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others - and that is their real crime." Dorries has crystallized fears among fellow Conservatives - who largely abandoned aristocratic leadership half a century ago - that Cameron and his "posh" friend Osborne could lose them the next election.

One of Cameron's newest and harshest critics is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Australian owner of Britain's popular Sun and Times newspapers.  "If David Cameron thinks his government only has to 'raise its game', he is badly mistaken" said the Sun newspaper. It called Cameron "divorced" from the lives of Britons and urged him to "speak for the many, not the few".  Murdoch is fighting his own battles after last year's phone hacking scandal at his News of the World tabloid newspaper.  He did back Cameron in the past but a cozy relationship, in which the Sun and News of the World editor (Rebekah Brooks) and Murdoch's daughter were part of a Chipping Norton set revolving around Cameron's country home, seems to have cooled since the phone hacking scandal. Disparities in Britain's class-conscious society (where breeding, wealth and schooling still dictate the fortunes of most people) are widening as the government forces through austerity plans to tackle a record budget deficit and assure jittery creditors over the euro debt crisis. In such difficult times it is easy to see why Cameron struggles to shrug off the electorally toxic "posh" tag, which contrasts sharply with those who have led the Conservatives since the 1960s, when the party ditched most of its aristocratic baggage in order to survive in a more egalitarian society.  He was educated at Eton, Britain's most exclusive school, and can trace his descent from King William IV - his lineage the fruit of an 18th-century affair with an Irish actress. Cameron's father was a wealthy stockbroker and his mother the daughter of a baronet - as is Cameron's wife Samantha, whose stepfather is a viscount from the wealthy Astor dynasty. Both Cameron, 45, and Osborne, 40, were members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, an exclusive 200-year-old dining society notorious for boisterous drinking. Compare that to Tory premiers of the recent past: builder's son Edward Heath, grocer's daughter Margaret Thatcher, and John Major who left school at the age of 16.

But Cameron's fall from grace can't be laid solely at the door of his "posh" background. It has come during a Europe-wide backlash against austerity which has savaged many European leaders.  This same backlash has crippled French President's Nicolas Sarkozy's re-election prospects and toppled the Dutch government. Among recent bad headlines for Cameron were those relating to a woman who accidentally set herself on fire after foolish government advice to store petrol at home after a threatened fuel supply strike; Osborne's annual budget was torn apart by critics fuming over a tax cut for the highest earners and a "granny tax" limiting help for pensioners; savage welfare reforms in chaos, with a record ­number of disabled ­people winning appeals against their ­benefits being slashed. Cameron has also been hit by a scandal, in which a party treasurer was secretly filmed offering journalists posing as millionaires a private dinner engagement with himself and wife Samantha at 10 Downing Street in exchange for large donations...reinforcing his image as part of an out-of-touch and elite clique.