Michael Rosen, snob.

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He's feted by the left-wing bien pensants, quoted and tweeted and shared by all those people who like their thought processed and precooked. And he loves to pen polemics castigating those who don't share his bigoted, judgemental world view. But worst of all, Michael Rosen is a snob.

This will come as a shock to Michael. I'm guessing he feels his inherited socialism, steeped in the world of a Marxist educational mafia, means that he is connected to the ordinary bloke. But this, a typical piece of his prose (not a patch on his poetry), reveals the truth - Michael's a snob, a cultural snob:

Perhaps you're mad keen on culture. Perhaps in between making all that money you were hanging around galleries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, comedy clubs, libraries, dance studios, painting classes. Perhaps you've seen how people manage on a shoe string, perhaps you've seen the awful conditions backstage in many theatres, perhaps you know about the crap wages most people in the arts work with. Perhaps you know about the terrible crisis we have in libraries, depriving people of access to knowledge and culture.

You see - the man he's writing about was busy 'making money' so wasn't able to consume any of that 'culture' that Michael is so keen on. Nasty, unappealing, noveau-riche money-grubbing mean you can't 'get' culture. Instead you should eschew all that for some sort of bohemian hair-shirt. Only then, in Michael's arrogant painting, will you qualify to speak of culture.

Like many from comfortable, middle-class origins, Michael Rosen is utterly dismissive of anything that looks like trade. There'll be lots of fine hand-wringing about how artists struggle and special pleading about The Arts. But the truth is that the business of culture that Michael holds out to us is a privileged, exclusive and incredibly snobbish world.  It's a world filled with judgement, with sneering and with a puffed up disdain for people who do the jobs that make it possible for us to fund what Michael calls "my sort of culture".

It's not Michael's ignorance that makes me despair (although he parades it in style every time his writes). We're all ignorant in our own way. Rather it's the way in which he assumes the superiority of his sort over the sort who work in banks. Yet everything Michael has, everything, comes from those bankers and businessman he loathes. The sense of entitlement, the demanding way in which Michael thrusts his collecting box under the noses of taxpayers, this is the truly shocking part.

Michael didn't write the hatchet job on Sajid Javid because he was a banker and a Tory. No he wrote the nasty little open letter because Sajid is a working-class lad made good. And that, in Michael's snobby little world makes him the worst sort of Tory banker.

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