The Tories have missed a trick by dismissing the working class. We’re the ones who’ll really destroy their chances

There has been a groundswell of ordinary, educated and politically savvy Britons who haven’t benefited from the last decade of Tory rule in the slightest. They should remember that

Last weekend, in a bizarre and insulting defence of his son’s awful relationship with honesty and the truth, Stanley Johnson, father of the prime minister and a former Conservative MEP, said that the British public isn't smart enough to spell Pinocchio.

Aside from the fact that spelling the name of an Italian puppet isn’t any measurement of intelligence, papa Johnson's insult reveals what the Tory elite really think about the average person in Britain. And it fundamentally misses who is really going to gut the Tories in the election.

While the Tories would like to imagine there’s some thuggish, stupid underclass pushing unfounded insults about a lying PM, people whose very upbringing should automatically disqualify them from political discourse, that person doesn’t exist, not really.

The Tories may dismiss the imaginary “illiterate” general public, (let’s face it, they mean working-class millennials), but they do so at their peril. It’s those who have come from less educated backgrounds who, through hard work and enough luck to make it through university, are going to come after the Tories the hardest.

There is a whole swathe of Britons raised working-class, whose parents didn’t have the same opportunities they did. In these families, university signals a good job, which means good money, buying a house and eventually settling down and raising the next generation in the lovely, warm and snuggly comfort of middle-class Britain. Social mobility, in other words – the belief that the next generation will have it better than the last.

Only, that didn't quite happen.

Hard-working “uneducated” lads and lasses, worked hard, displayed commitment, ambition and become educated. They held up their end of the bargain. They did as they were asked, but instead of the reward of a better life, they were crushed by 10 years of Tory rule.

Under the coalition government, student fees tripled in the early 2010s, pricing out those from poorer households and lumbering those brave enough to take the leap with thousands of pounds of debt.

Housing has become unaffordable without huge handouts, while renting continues to get more expensive and insecure. Austerity has run rampant, stripping away funding and assets. And to top it all off, the internal Tory fight that is Brexit has thrown Britain into perpetual political turmoil with no end or satisfactory result in sight.

In short, a generation, the millennials between the ages of 23-38, have been abandoned, forgotten, screwed over and laughed at.

There has been a groundswell of educated and politically savvy Britons who haven’t benefited from the last decade of Tory rule, and have seen the benefits given to previous generations stripped away from them by dogmatic dedication to Conservative austerity.

Since 2010, we've had three prime ministers, a handful of leadership elections from parties, a huge and ridiculous referendum and two general elections with one less than a week away. That’s a lot of politics. And a lot of people paying attention to politicians.

It’s easy for Stanley Johnson to dismiss the idea of his son being a liar when that accusation comes from what seems to be the Conservative Party's natural enemy – no, not compassion – the working class. The problem is they still think of the working class as disengaged, or beneath the complex workings of Westminster. That has never been the case. Moreover, they are blind to the educated working class who have been robbed and know who the thieves are. We might be an invisible group to the Tories, but trust me, we can see them clearly.