Your class still counts, whatever you call it

Hurrah for Earl Cadogan, the aristocrat with a £1.3bn fortune, who is currently fighting in the High Court to protect the working classes. Those he has pitted himself against maintain that the very concept of the "working classes" is meaningless, and as countless polls have shown us, they may have a narrow point.

Now, while manual labourers who have bought their own property often consider themselves middle-class, those who are high-earning professionals declare that they work, and therefore that they are working class. Much of this, while strictly speaking true, may as well, for all it really means, be sheer sophistry.

Certainly, sheer sophistry is being exercised at the moment in the High Court, with Michael Barnes QC arguing on behalf of the property developer Dano Ltd a semantic point whose implication is that Britain no longer needs social housing. Which, as any fool knows, is utterly, utterly absurd.

The dispute focuses on a restrictive covenant drawn up by the current earl's grandfather in 1929 when he sold the land to the local council. It stipulated that the land should be used to benefit the poor and in particular "for the housing of the working classes".

However, since the land is in posh and expensive Chelsea, its current owners are keen to exploit it to the financial limit by building luxury homes on the extremely valuable plot. In order to get away with this, they are arguing that back in 1929 "working classes" meant those employed in manual or industrial jobs for wages. Now, the learned QC insists, "it is not possible to say with any certainty or precision what is meant by the working classes or whether any person is within that description."

It may no longer be easy to arrange and categorise people by their means of obtaining a living, and people may no longer accept their categorisation without cavil or complaint. But while overt judgements about people and their place in society may no longer be quite the thing, our culture still, without actually calling a spade a spade, divides people up in this manner all the time.

Look, for example, at yesterday's newspaper headlines, which focused not on the fact that Wallis Simpson cheated on Edward Windsor with three men, but that she cheated on him with, as the Mirror put it in royal purple on its front page, "a second-hand car salesman called Trundle".

The paper, having dished up this dirt, then called it "the greatest royal scandal ever". Is this a greater scandal than that which saw the present heir to the throne cheat on his wife, or the wife in question cheat on the heir to the throne, while both brought up small children who were also, of course, heirs to the throne? Surely not, as Mrs Simpson was not married to Mr Windsor at the time, and therefore was simply two-timing her boyfriend.

The scandal, it appears, is not centred on the racy sexual incontinence for which Mrs Simpson is already well known, but the fact that "second-hand car salesman" is code for 'dodgy, ignorant geezer' and "Trundle" is a mildly comic surname that suggests "poor breeding".

So it is that the "scandal" lies not so much in the questionable sexual behaviour, but in the class divide that can be massaged out of these bare words. The gaffe is blown rather, when it is revealed, in a letter to the then commissioner for Scotland Yard, that Mr Trundle's full name was "Guy Marcus Trundle, now living at 18 Bruton Street" – next door to the birthplace of the present Queen. He was, it turned out "a well-bred adventurer" and son of "a clerk in holy orders" – and therefore not so very shockingly lowly at all. This doesn't matter. What does matter is that without actually mentioning class divides, or class labels at all, newspaper headline writers can send coded messages about class to their readers, safe in the knowledge that they will be immediately understood.

Such messages are sent and received constantly. What is almost a taboo nowadays, though, is acknowledging what is going on. A classic example of this was Wife Swap, the four-part Channel Four series that proved a huge hit. The show would have been more accurately, though less enticingly, titled, "Class Swap". The programme makers relied for dramatic tension – with one exception when they went for racism to add piquancy to the brew – on swapping aspirational women into unaspirational households, and vice versa.

The results, of course, made for compulsive viewing. One woman struck a blow for the unpretentious lifestyle by introducing a family of organised, education-oriented, healthy eaters to the joys of the deep fat fryer, and the bliss of having loads of pals round for a water-fighting party on a school night. She also laid off the cleaner and scorned her Ikea-managing swapee's pilates classes.

Another, whose son admitted to avoiding both of his ghastly parents as much as he possibly could, betrayed his mother by striking up a warm relationship with the enemy and enthusiastically attending her drama workshops. His mother, having berated drama-woman for not washing out her grill pan, or looking after her odious husband properly, eventually left her über-chauvinist beloved, calling him a "monster".

What is really fascinating though, is the war of words that has been going on behind the Wife Swap scenes. While the programme makers carefully avoided alluding to their code – which was that the aspirational families were middle class and the unaspirational ones working class – middle-class critics were not so shy.

The London Evening Standard's Victor Lewis Smith echoed the discomfort of many when he accused the show's producer, Stephen Lambert of being "expert at persuading naive working-class families to sign release forms before coldly dissecting their lives on screen in the name of entertainment".

His concentration on the working-class families as being the exploited ones is fair enough, because within the context of the programme, the lowlier family always came out the loser. Lambert, though, when interviewed by media commentator David Rowan, contended that it was "patronising to say that these people were being hoodwinked". Essentially, the broad objection to the programme is that it exploits the ignorant – whom Mr Lewis Smith is not afraid to identify as "working class", while the defence is that even identifying ignorance as being "working class" is snobbish and wrong.

I think that Wife Swap teaches us something very important about what the new class assumptions in England are, the discomfort with which we react to their confirmation, and the extreme reluctance we feel about acknowledging them.

"Working class" is no longer a term that can be qualified with the word "respectable", because it is now almost wholly a subtly loaded insult. The term carries with it implications of the worst sort of conservative, retrogressive values, including bad food, bad taste and dreadful gender assumptions. You don't have to be comfortably off to be middle-class, you just need to subscribe to progressive attitudes (as the respectable working classes so recently did). Likewise you don't have to be poor to be working class, just common.

None of this though, helps you to obtain an affordable home in London. Only Earl Cadogan might swing that.

d.orr@independent.co.uk