A Conservative Party campaign billboard in London featuring the image of its leader, David Cameron, has been defaced with the spray-painted slogan "F--- off back to Eton." Is it Cameron's fault that he has an unfortunately smug countenance, which an Italian friend of mine calls "a face of slaps," or that his parents sent him to Eton College, that fertile plot where the future tsars of Britain are carefully watered and weeded?
Class warfare in Britain is dead, we hear over and over - certainly there are no riots on the street, and no one is screaming "Maggie Maggie Maggie, out out out" like they did in 1983. However in a country where you can be precisely pigeonholed, educationally and geographically, from the moment you open your mouth, there's never going to be a complete armistice. Especially not during a hotly contested national election.
At the moment, the battle is being waged in a most entertaining fashion on two of London's stages: In Sloane Square, where the hair and hedges seem to be cut daily with manicure scissors, the Royal Court Theatre has a huge hit with Posh, Laura Wade's new play about aristocratic bully boys whose capacity for moaning over the lost land of privilege is outstripped only by their capacity for drink.
Meanwhile, on grotty Euston Road, Billy Bragg, that working-class hero, is providing nightly live musical accompaniment for Mick Gordon's new play Pressure Drop, about the other end of the social spectrum, the blighted urban poor of Britain, who are as aggrieved as their wealthy counterparts. Both classes feel like England has been stolen from them, and each is royally pissed, in both senses of the word. But who has done the stealing? Or, as they might say in Bragg's neighbourhood of Barking, East London - Oi! Who's nicked the country, then?
"I mean I am sick, sick to [bleeping]death of poor people," one of the characters seethes in Posh. He and nine university friends are wearing tailcoats, sitting around a table littered with bottles of claret and complaining that they have to let tourists into their grand ancestral homes in order to pay for the holes in the roof. They are a dying breed, their world eclipsed by the middle-class strivers "who think they're cultured because they read a big newspaper and eat asparagus."
The characters in Posh are young, volatile and very angry. They're members of the fictional Riot Club, a hedonistic outfit that is clearly based on the real-life Bullingdon Club, an elite Oxford University clique of mayhem-causing gourmands, whose number once included the top Tories George Osborne, London mayor Boris Johnson and (possible future prime minister) David Cameron.
Toward the end of Posh, things get a bit Lord of the Flies (or maybe that should be House of Lords of the Flies, or perhaps Dukes and Viscounts of the Flies). Violence figures in Pressure Drop, too, as the put-upon Tony, who has no real job, who's lost a son in Afghanistan and fears he's lost his country to "ragheads," gives in to his worst racist tendencies.
"There will be a reckoning," Bragg sings between scenes, and you know his heart is in the words. This week, the singer got in a finger-jabbing argument with a politician from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party, who was campaigning in Bragg's east-end riding - a neighbourhood where the party has a frighteningly strong foothold.
So there's fury in the castles and on the council estates, too: It's like an angry sandwich with middle-class filling. What's wonderful is that the theatre is the one place these issues can be played out. All the politicians are too afraid of making much of the class issue on the campaign trail, either for fear of being seen as too posh (the Tories) or too bolshie (Labour). But if you listen closely, you can hear the skeletons rattling in the Tory closet: For one thing, Cameron reportedly asked his hyphenated candidates to truncate their names, so that Annunziata Rees-Mogg would become Nancy Mogg. And his party certainly hasn't been parading its old lion, Sir Nicholas Winterton, who caused a stir earlier this year when he defended an MP's right to travel first class on the train, because a "totally different type of people" can be found in steerage. (I am one of those people, and believe me, Sir Nick, the food is better where you are.)
The poles are not so clearly defined as the two plays might suggest: The leader of the progressive Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, went to a posh private school, as did Labour's Tony Blair. This week a very popular question in England was: "Do you know who fagged for Nick Clegg at Westminster?" Surely that sentence would be incomprehensible anywhere else in the English-speaking world; it refers to a fellow student who had to do menial chores. In this case, the "fag" was Louis Theroux, now a popular TV host, which just shows you how tightly entwined the circles of power still are.
Posh is playing to sold-out crowds at the Royal Court; I'm not sure that Pressure Drop is going to be quite so popular, despite the marquee appeal of Billy Bragg. The angry rich are still a bigger draw than the hostile poor. More than 70 years after George Orwell wrote, in The Road to Wigan Pier, that "everyone knows that class prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it," you can still hear the faint echo of gunfire, just offstage.