The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, one of the main lines of attack on the Reform candidate is that he used to be an academic and is therefore ill-suited to being the area’s parliamentary representative. The candidate who has suffered these attacks – Matt Goodwin – has countered that he is the first person in his family to have gone to university. He has also stressed that he was brought up in a one-parent household.

That hasn’t cut it with the class-warriors of his rivals like the Green party’s Hannah Spencer. In one of her campaign videos, Ms Spencer has gone so far as to do a speech to camera while preparing some plaster for a wall. Having been a plumber, she is, she has said, training to be a plasterer. A craft she appears to be some way off mastering, if her video is anything to go by.

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In a recent interview the Green party candidate expounded on her view that someone who had taught at a university should not represent Gorton and Denton. In fact it seems that anyone who has a degree should not represent any constituency. As she complained: ‘In Westminster I think 90 per cent of MPs have at least one degree, and it’s time that we changed that.’

Warming to her theme, she declared: ‘I want to see tradespeople on the benches in parliament,........

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