As Britain becomes more global, it also becomes more regional — Scottish independence, London as the great sucking black hole of talent and money — and small differences, and ancient rules and distinctions, seem to matter more in a country that, as the old cliché goes, has lost an empire and still not found a role.

The pettiness is particularly vivid in a Britain that, if it were Greece to America’s Rome, as Harold Macmillan once said, is no longer even that. If Washington cares what Britain thinks, it doesn’t do much to show it. The unjustly powerful and hopelessly middle-brow United States, of course, remains a British obsession, blamed for everything from “American Idol” and Black Friday to Internet porn and obesity, as if the pub, Christmas sales, soggy fries and the full British breakfast (bready sausage, bacon, baked beans, eggs and bread fried in fat) were all imports from the old colony, where every person, Britons seem convinced, packs at least a pistol, if not a submachine gun.

This is a Britain ever more unequal but uneasy about snobbery and “poshness,” where to be middle class of a certain sort (actually upper class but graciously self-deprecating) seems the ideal. Just look at Prince William, marrying the graceful daughter of a couple who made a fortune selling party favors, cooing over baby George like a family in a sitcom.

Mr. Mellor, of course, with the snobbery of the striver, went to a selective state school, not one of England’s elite schools, attended by Prime Minister David Cameron; the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne; and Mr. Mitchell himself. The elite, of course, do their best not to appear so, even if they dominate the country. As Toby Young warned in The Spectator magazine, “being perceived as upper class in contemporary Britain is the kiss of death, and not just in politics.”

The more unequal Britain becomes, he said, “the less we want to talk about it.” Britain is a nation of “inverted snobs,” because to claim one cares about class “is, in itself, a low-class indicator.”

All of which made Mr. Mellor even more ridiculous, reminding many of the apocryphal story of another outraged politician who demanded of a policeman, “Do you know who I am?” The policeman then radioed in, asking for an ambulance, saying, “There’s some old toff here who doesn’t know his name.”

Of course Britons of a certain kind remain marked by the experiences and humiliations of their adolescence. It’s difficult to think of another country where every time personages are in the news, let alone when they die, they are classified by the school they attended as a prepubescent youngster.