There's a risk as you read this that a wrong lesson will be being drawn from the result of tomorrow's by-election in Crewe & Nantwich. If Labour lose, after tactics involving toff-mocking campaigners in top hats, many will say this shows that in 21st-century British politics appeals to class hatred will not win votes. Already (in yesterday's Times) my colleague Daniel Finkelstein suggests that attacks on toffs, if not on rich spivs, no longer resonate.

The boundary between toffs and rich spivs is distinctly porous. Toffs are often the children or grandchildren of spivs rich enough to send them to public school. The Tory Notting Hill set are not quite toffs, anyway: Notting Hill is slightly naff, hardly toff heartland, and it's a sign of not being a toff that one doesn't mark the distinction. But leave that aside. If Labour lose this by-election the loss should not be blamed on one silly by-election gimmick that might have raised a smile for an afternoon but should never have been pounded into a campaign theme. It will lose it because Britain has fallen violently out of love with a Labour Government and its new Prime Minister. And if the Tories win, that will not be because we British no longer nurse latent class resentments, but because we're in the mood for a fling with Cameron & Co and do not seek sticks with which to beat him. Not yet.

If and when we do then - count on it - class will return as an issue. The Conservative Party would be very unwise to conclude from one dopey Labour by-election campaign that nobody notices or cares any more that the inner circle of the incoming political class went to top public schools. We do notice, and, while overlooking it for the present, we are not as a nation wholly comfortable with it. The Daily Mail, which points the way, carries no candle for toffs and never has.

Daniel is right that the British working class has no particular animus against the gentry. But the middle classes - and especially the lower middle classes (from which, by one generation removed, I come) - do. It's a mixture of envy, aspiration and resentment at the transmission of advantage by birth and education rather than work and merit. We think a lot of public school boys are twits with polish. When I encounter expensive shirts and upper-class accents I have always presumed vacuity until offered firm evidence to the contrary; though eminently rebuttable, it's a helpful rule of thumb. Slowly getting to know middling-to-lower-class people often involves the gradual discovery of how capable they are. Getting to know public-school-educated people often involves the discovery (it can take years) of how dimwitted they are.

In my view David Cameron is well on his way to rebutting that presumption; but if he and his circle think for a moment they do not need to rebut it, or to keep renewing the rebuttal year after year, they will be making a mistake. Gordon Brown is just crass and his Government doomed; but in identifying class as a potential problem for the new Tory dispensation, Labour's instincts are not so wholly adrift as, tomorrow, the pundits will be pronouncing.

Masochist: “Smack me! Smack me!”

Sadist (with slow relish): “Nooo.”

I see Stonewall, the gay campaigning group, is stirring up protest at a registrar, Lillian Ladele, whose refusal on grounds of conscience to officiate at gay civil partnerships has exposed her (she claims) to persecution by colleagues and her employers, Islington council. Stonewall insists that public servants must carry out the law. In theory this is indisputable.

In practice, I hesitate. Listen to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, or Dr Rowan Williams, or dozens of Catholic and other MP-dissenters from the Embryology Bill in the Commons this week. Victimhood is all the rage in the “faith” community. Despite having itself persecuted minorities for centuries, the Church is now revelling in the status.

“Persecute us!” they cry.

“Nooo,” I say. Turn a blind eye to conscientious objectors. Give them a sick note. Get them out of the newspapers. They're enjoying it.

I was in Catalonia over the weekend, noticing how much less sterling now buys in the eurozone.

So has my sister, Belinda, who lives there. She told me everything has to be recalculated downward. So when some English guests had asked her the distance to the nearest village, and she started the mental arithmetic to translate between kilometres and miles, she stopped, and thought: “No! Miles must be less now; what is the new rate?” - before remembering that not every imperial measurement has been devalued.

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