Politics turned ugly this week when Westminster descended on the North for the controversial Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

The mass flock of politicians to Crewe highlights more than anything the immense pressure Gordon Brown is under at present. If Labour loses Crewe as a stronghold, defeat at the next general election looks likely.

So why then does Labour seem to be trying so hard to lose it? Tamsin Dunwoody’s ‘Toff’ campaign raises a laugh at first but then you can’t help but question the mentalities of these people baying for our vote. With a campaign team strutting around in top hats, the whole thing looks more like something you’d see at the crossroads in Cardiff during student elections than a demonstration of what our political leaders can do for us.

In the midst of such extreme political panic New Labour resembles something more like Ancient Labour. It wouldn’t even be so bad if Dunwoody had managed to secure her facts about Edward Timpson but she hadn’t, which makes the whole thing really quite embarrassing. In her leaflet she condemns Timpson as being “one of them – a Tory boy who’s used to being waited on, not serving other people – his £1.5 million mansion in the Cheshire countryside has exotic South American llamas roaming the farmland behind.” (Just to save the llamas from any unsolicited disgrace at the centre of this political circus, apparently they do not belong to Timpson.)

I don’t think Dunwoody, plucked from Labour aristocracy, is in any position to be calling names as she clearly chooses to overlook the credentials of her fellow Labour Party members. The ugly truth is, of course, that the class war tactic doesn’t and can’t work for Labour when most of the cabinet went to public schools and can – if we are basing our argument on education and wealth, which Dunwoody clearly is – also be typecast as Toffs. Lest we forget, Tony Blair has just bought a £4m house.

By clutching at the old class-war straw Labour have publicly exposed themselves as weak, even more so as Timpson refuses to play the game which leaves Labour looking like the silly kid in the playground. And yes, we are all staring.

While Dunwoody might presume Timpson has nothing in common with the Crewe electorate, at least he is addressing local issues rather than hoping that a class war campaign will win his position. Labour has a serious battle to fight but I’m not convinced that undermining the electorate’s ability to make decisions on policies by confronting them with posh Toffs versus cloth caps is the way to win.

At the risk of sounding as though I take this all too seriously, I can’t help but think that Labour have only made themselves look smug – believing they still represent the ‘working classes’ and that they have an inalienable claim to their vote.

Hasn’t Dunwoody heard the news? We are all bourgeois now… WW