British politcians left to rue a week of class-related faux pas

Andrew Mitchell has become the latest in a forlorn line of Conservative politicians who have trudged through Britain's libel courts hoping to restore their reputations - only to sustain heavy damage to their public image and their wallets.

Mr Mitchell, the Conservatives' former chief whip - or enforcer of party discipline - was left facing an estimated legal bill of up to £3m after failing to prove he was the victim of a conspiracy by police to besmirch his name.

The public-school-educated ex-army officer insisted he had not called a policeman a "f****** pleb" during an altercation at the iron gates of Downing Street. The judge disagreed, ruling that Mr Mitchell probably had used the four-letter p-word, which has particularly toxic connotations in Britain's class-bound society.

Pleb is a word used by the products of Britain's elite public schools. Short for "plebeian" - and thus smelling of Latin lessons - it is a dismissive term indicating lower social status.

It landed Mr Mitchell, who was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, in particularly hot water because his senior Tory colleagues David Cameron and George Osborne, both privately educated, had been claiming that Britons were "all in it together" tackling economic hardship.

The social playing field was hardly levelled when the judge, Mr Justice Mitting - aka Sir John Mitting, another private school alumnus - explained why he had decided that Mr Mitchell had used the p-word. Toby Rowland, the police officer at the heart of the affair, lacked the "wit, imagination and inclination" to invent the word "pleb", the judge said.

Mr Mitchell's humbling was the latest in a week of class-related faux pas by Britain's politicians.

After the polls closed in the Rochester and Strood by-election, Emily Thornberry, a wealthy Labour MP, was forced to step down as shadow attorney-general after tweeting an image of a modest house in the constituency, draped in England flags and with a white van parked outside. Her tweet was described as "snobby" by the home's owner.

Then, David Mellor, a former Conservative minister, was secretly recorded lambasting a London cabbie as a "sweaty, stupid little shit". Mr Mellor claimed to know a better way home - adding for good measure that he was a former cabinet minister and Queen's Counsel.

Totting it all up, it has been "an extraordinary week", according to Peter York, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The connotations of "pleb" made it a taboo word among "sophisticated, modern, urban upper-class people. They would rather die than be caught saying that sort of thing today," he said.

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Crucially for Mr Mitchell and other Tory grandees, reputation is not a guarantee of success in Britain's expensive libel courts.

Jonathan Aitken, another former Tory cabinet minister, went to court in 1999 with the promise to "cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism . . . with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play". He had been accused by the Guardian newspaper and Granada Television of breaking ministerial rules by allowing an Arab businessman to pay for his stay in the Paris Ritz; the case collapsed and he was given an 18-month jail sentence for perjury.

Jeffrey Archer, the novelist and former deputy Tory chairman, won a libel case in 1987 involving allegations that he had paid a prostitute for sex. In the original trial, the judge, Justice Caulfield, instructed the jury to take account of the bearing of Lord Archer's wife, Mary. "Has she elegance?" he asked in his summing up. "Has she fragrance? Is he in need of cold, unloving . . . sex in a seedy hotel?"

The politician's reputation was destroyed in 2001, however, when he ill-advisedly crossed an old friend, Ted Francis, who disclosed that the original allegations were true, resulting in Lord Archer receiving a four-year jail term for perjury and perverting the course of justice

A third doomed Tory libel case concerned Neil Hamilton, a former trade minister, who went to court over allegations that he took cash to ask questions in parliament on behalf of Mohamed Fayed's Harrods group. The case collapsed hours before it was due to start, after another Tory MP named in the scandal admitted the newspaper's account was true.

Mr Mitchell left the High Court this week saying he was "bitterly disappointed". Observers of British justice will note that while one usually has to be wealthy to bring a libel case in London, there are no assurances of a positive result - except for the lawyers.

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