THE group of Conservative MPs claiming to represent “blue-collar workers” is funded by a City trader who is one of Britain’s richest men.

Blue Collar Conservatism is a Tory group claiming to “focus on working-class voters” and fight Labour’s “posh metropolitan socialism.” It lists 158 MPs as supporters on its website.

Figures from the Electoral Commission show Michael Spencer is Blue Collar Conservatism’s chief funder — he has given the Tory group £45,000 since 2019, with the latest donation, £15,000, made last July.

Spencer is definitely Conservative. He was Tory treasurer and donated over £5 million to the party. 

But is he blue collar? 

I searched for photographs of Spencer. In most he wears a white-collar shirt, in some cases a pale pink-collar shirt.  

Pictures of Spencer in a blue-collar boiler suit or work shirt are elusive — probably because Spencer is the 161st richest person in the UK, with an £800m fortune, from running City financial trading giant NEX Group (formerly Icap). 

Spencer’s not-blue-collar family background includes being a boarder at a fee-paying public school inside a monastery and going to university at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 

Spencer made one of his donations to Blue Collar Conservatism through his company, IPGL Ltd, based in that well-known blue-collar London location, Sloane Street in Knightsbridge.

Blue-Collar Conservatives also got £15,000 in donations from serial investor Nigel Wray. 

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Blue Collar Conservatism is led by David Nuttall, the ultra-right former Tory MP who showed his unique ability to reach northern working-class voters by losing his Bury North seat to Labour in 2017. 

Nuttall is not mentioned anywhere on the Blue Collar Conservatism website, but he is one of the two directors of the company — presumably his election defeat makes him a bit too embarrassing to mention.

Nuttall was one of the MPs who camped out for several days outside a House of Commons office in 2013 to get 40 Bills onto the order paper they called the “Alternative Queen’s Speech.” 

The Bills included such eye-catching right-wing plans as a Margaret Thatcher Day holiday and bringing back hanging. 

Their “employment opportunities” Bill offered blue-collar workers the opportunity to opt out of the minimum wage, to get lower regional minimum wages in low-pay areas and sub-minimum “training wages.”

Esther McVey is described as the “founder” of Blue Collar Conservatism, and is one of its public faces. 

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McVey lost her urban Merseyside Wirral West seat in 2015, and only got back into Parliament by winning the super-safe Tory Tatton seat (previously held by George Osborne) covering posh towns and villages in Cheshire.

Jon Stone, policy correspondent of the Independent, recently went through all the MPs who are in the Blue Collar Conservatism group and found that around of a third of them went to public schools (compared with 7 per cent of the general population). 

Members of the group attended the most expensive fee-paying schools, including Eton, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Harrow, Westminster School and Dulwich College. 

Stone found that many of the MPs made pretty silly attempts to hide their backgrounds in their biographies on the Blue Collar Conservatism website. 

For example, MP Sir Peter Bottomley is described as having come “from a lorry driver to the House of Commons,” but his biography omits to mention that he attended Westminster School and Trinity College Cambridge, and that his father and grandfather were both knights and attended the same Oxbridge college as him. 

Privately educated MP Robert Courts is described as having been “self-employed for 12 years prior to entering Parliament,” failing to mention that he was self-employed as a barrister.

Funded by a banker, led by public schoolboys, Blue Collar Conservatism spends much of its time trying to connect with working-class voters on “cultural” issues around “law and order” and “patriotism.” 

They want to turn “blue-collar” issues into “cultural” issues because they don’t want to call for higher wages, better work conditions or better funding of services.