Tory and Labour as identities are increasingly comparable to romantic, 19th-century nationalism. The codification of national traditions and costumes happens when the organic society which produced them is fading, like Scots wearing kilts only once the Highlanders had vanished.

That politicians boast about eating the stodgy diet of 1950s steelworkers is a sign of that society having gone. It's self-referential and anachronistic, like Gaelic on lowland Scots signposts. How many middle-class northern professionals ca. 1950 ate chip butties?

Rees-Mogg is to an Edwardian gentlemen, what one of Walter Scott's Highlanders in Waverley was to an actual Highlander.

Middle-class PhD pretending to be a prole, without realising that working class people don't really care now, or in the past about displays of wealth. It's all imaginative larping. https://twitter.com/BethWinterMP/status/1281532318998560770