Rory Stewart has made Pret a Manger the front line of a political class war

Rory Stewart was the talk of London town over the weekend. First for his resignation from the Conservative Party to run for Mayor of our capital city, then for declaring his favourite pub was not a pub but the butty shop, Pret a Manger.

The internet responded as it traditionally does, with disdain, then mockery and then by ardently pointing out how little it actually matters. The idea is indeed funny that this odd guy is trying to win over the votes of the common people while they avoid eye contact and eat their chicken Caesar with smashed avocado. But we are wrong about it not mattering.

If you’re the kind of person who tweeted that you care more about policies than pubs, that’s okay, but you might just be middle class. There is nothing wrong with that, in fact, it sounds absolutely lovely.

But saying “I prefer Pret to pubs” is like saying you shop at Waitrose or you like rugby union, it’s a perfectly everyday statement which just isn’t everyone’s every day.

This isn’t to say the working class never go into Pret (but I did have to google their menu for the chicken Caesar bit) nor is it to say we’re all utter reprobates who spend our entire day smashed in the local boozer. But the pub is symbolic of the working class.

It’s a trusty, mostly stable, place where people can connect and there is some level of class equality. A pint, even in London, cost the same for everyone. In their ideal form, they’re a place where anyone is welcome. Most working-class people will experience a pub at some point. The same is not true of Pret a Manger

We know most politicians don’t just pop in the local for a swift pint and maybe a go on the karaoke. We know it. They know it. But the public house is always a good photo op for the public schooled. That visual still works.

Look at Nigel Farage. A boarding schoolboy turned commodities broker who I can only assume gained popularity largely because he has been photographed countless times with a pint in his hands.

It’s a cynical but effective tactic, and it works because there is so little genuine working-class representation in politics.The number of MPs from jobs in manual labour dropped from 16 per cent to 3 per cent in the 36 years to 2015.

This lack of representation in the so-called House of Commons has a knock-on effect on how the working class engages in politics. It’s sad but true that if you can’t see yourself in the narrative you don’t feel a part of it. It’s the political shift towards middle-class concerns – like which is the best Pret a Manger on the Central Line – which has ostracised the working class from politics.

Politicians and political commentators are not Phoebe Waller-Bridge. No one will reward them for showing off how middle class they are.

London may be a buzzing metropolitan centre of the so-called “liberal elite” but a lot of working class people live there too, it isn’t just white northern blokes like me. Any mayoral candidate, even an ex-Tory one, needs to understand that trying to badge yourself as an ordinary guy by invoking the ubiquity of Pret is not as simple as it might sound to middle class ears.

Stewart’s apparent love of fancy sandwiches’ is not a political disaster (a real political disaster would be eating a bacon butty in an unusual way, of course). But in the response that followed there lies a useful truth about privilege and class blindness. In politics, representation matters.