David Mellor is a bully and a braggart of the first order — where is his class now?

The Tory grandee's awful verbal attack on a cab driver doesn't teach us anything that we don't already know

David Mellor (Getty Images)

Say what you will against vehicles that are emblematic of “the working classes”, but at least give them this: as agent provocateurs of national angst, they are no respecters of the political divide.

So it is that Labour’s White Van Man catastrophe swiftly gives way to the London Cabbie debacle involving someone whom the Sun describes as “a Tory grandee”.

Frankly, I cannot and will not accept David Mellor as a grandee. Although he spent no part of his childhood on a council estate, à la Emily Thornberry, his upbringing as the grammar school-educated son of a Dorset secondary school teacher disqualifies him.

Francis Urquhart and the late Alan Clark will confirm that one cannot be a Tory grandee without having spent adolescence shooting game birds. Things may have slipped since the Conservatives started letting any old oik become an MP, but some standards survive.

The closest Mr Mellor comes to being a “grandee” is that the word is an anagram of “enraged” (see below). But this is not to suggest that he lacks grandeur. Any residual doubt about that was removed by the Socratic dialogue of last Friday which cabbie “Brian” (a sobriquet he adopted when Mellor demanded his name) thoughtfully recorded on his phone.

Before we pick out some choice lines, the context may be useful. After a trip to Buckingham Palace to watch his wife Lady Penelope Cobham receive a CBE from the Prince of Wales – the subtlety of the class warfare symbolism is a joy – and then a long lunch at which drink may or may not have been taken, Mr Mellor wished to return with haste to their east London home by the Thames.

A proper gent such as Sherlock Holmes would have tapped on the glass partition, and said “St Catherine’s Dock, and not a moment to lose. There’s a sovereign for you, driver, if we make it by sundown.” Being quite the arriviste (I hope none of this sounds snobby), Mr Mellor become abusive when his navigational instructions were ignored. Exactly how he incited “Brian” to activate his recorder is not clear. But considering that the first recorded line of the exchange is “I know who I’m talking to…” we might guess at “Do you know who I am?

If so, as victims of what Harley Street specialists call Winnerial Disease (after my late friend Michael) always do, Mr Mellor made a category error. The plain fact of needing to ask this question automatically translates it to “Do you know who I was?”

Should the driver have forgotten, Mr Mellor was happy to remind him that he was not only a QC, but a former Cabinet minister and award-winning broadcaster. He might have mentioned the large fortune he made in business, much from advising firms in the Middle East, but modesty forbade.

“You’ve been driving a cab for ten years,” he exploded when “Brian” made an audacious but forlorn attempt to establish his own credentials. “You think that your experiences are anything compared to mine? Just shut up for Christ’s sake … and keep a civil tongue in your head.” Like this present re-eruption of crude class warfare itself, the phrase has a deliciously nostalgic twang. In fact, “Brian” kept a civil tongue throughout. When Mr Mellor told him to “shut the fuck up,” he showed ungodly forbearance by any standards, let alone those of his trade. “If you’ve had a bad experience, I’ll apologise,” he said, “but to be honest I think …”

“I don’t want to hear this… ” interrupted Mr Mellor. “Shut up. You either say you’re really sorry - you’re a little guy who will learn when you get older - or you shut the fuck up.” And save for promising to denounce “Brian” on his LBC show, calling him “little guy” again, repeatedly accusing him of “fucking up” Lady P’s big day (a charge she then unaccountably levelled at her husband), threatening to switch allegiance to the cabbie’s deadly rivals at Uber, and advising “Brian” to “get a better education” if he wished to be sarcastic with a silk of his ilk, that was that.

With any such epochal event, we look for new and important lessons. From this one, sadly, the only ones to be drawn are either depressingly old or dismally narrow. David Mellor is a bully, a braggart and - in the circs, you will excuse the indelicacy - a twat of the very first order. If fate sees fit to reward you with the name of Lady Penelope, take the hint: buy a pink Rolls-Royce and hire a chauffeur called Parker, and so avoid the potential for black cab nightmares. And while John Major’s “classless society” remains a distant dream, our lethal disdain for fellow citizens continues to manifest itself in varied forms.

I have a dream myself. It may lack the utopian quality of Sir John’s, let alone Dr King’s, but it gives me pleasure and you are welcome to share it. In my dream, David Mellor and Emily Thornberry swap minds for the day. Emily tweets a sneery snap of “Brian’s” cab. David takes an Uber saloon car (the last chance saloon) to a St George’s flag-bedecked Rochester address, where he calls the inhabitant “little guy” and tells him to “shut the fuck up” in ignorance that White Van Dan is a cage-fighter. As any Queen’s Counsel of Mr Mellor’s seniority would concur, rough justice is better than no justice at all.