When economic interests are not involved, the attack switches to the Tories' supposed social aloofness and otherness from the pleasures and pastimes enjoyed by the rest of Britain — as if the Labour leadership's own interests and tastes were wholly in tune with those of the average Briton. (Balls lists his recreations as football and the violin.)

Why has Balls taken Labour's rhetoric back to a time before Blair? Having joined Brown's office in 1994, Balls was, after all, at the heart of the New Labour project, albeit as a Brownite, throughout. And is Labour's new rhetoric likely to be succesful?

Balls's attitude can partly be explained by his own background. It is not that Balls had a working-class upbringing — far from it. His father, Professor Michael Balls, is a zoologist who specialised in finding alternatives to animal experimentation. He taught at the universities of East Anglia and Nottingham; during his time at East Anglia, when Ed was a small boy, the older Balls actually taught at Eton for a term as part of an exchange programme with the school. At a substantial financial sacrifice to his parents, Ed and his two siblings went to fee-paying schools. Ed attended a "minor public school", Nottingham High. (Tory minister Ken Clarke attended the same school when it was a direct grant grammar school. Its fees are now £12,291 a year.) Ed then followed in his father's footsteps to Keble College, Oxford. There he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and graduated with apparently the fourth highest first in his year — according to Independent columnist John Rentoul, a higher first than that of his contemporary David Cameron. Balls too was a member of an Oxford drinking club, the Steamers, albeit one with a lesser pedigree than Cameron's Bullingdon.

Balls went on to be a journalist at the Financial Times, as did his younger brother Andrew. For both brothers the paper was a stepping stone to greater things; Andrew is now Deputy Chief Investment Officer of Pimco, the world's largest bond trader. He was reportedly paid a bonus earlier this year of £4.5 million.

Most of Britain is simply not familiar with the kind of world of privilege that Balls enjoys attacking. Apart from having heard of Eton and Harrow and perhaps Winchester, they have no conception of the pecking order — or indeed that there is a pecking order — in the independent schools attended by 7 per cent or so of children. Until the press went overboard on reports of the university antics of Cameron and Boris Johnson, few people had ever heard of the Bullingdon Club, let alone knew how it might differ from other "lesser" Oxbridge drinking societies. Most people have never met a banker or fund manager whose annual bonus is more than they can expect to earn in a lifetime. Because of his background, Balls is acutely aware of these worlds, while not part of them. Might not this be the cause of his anger? It seems too visceral to be wholly confected.

It is undoubtedly the case that the current government is widely perceived, to paraphrase occasional Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, as consisting of a cabal of out-of-touch posh boys who don't know the price of milk. The fact is that Cameron's government, as I have previously argued in these pages, is the least patrician, least wealthy and least public-school-educated — indeed the least Etonian — Conservative-led government this country has ever seen. This reality will, however, do nothing to change perceptions — and in electoral terms it is perceptions that matter.