A funny thing about politicians of the posher breed is that the more they try to come across as the ordinary folk they imagine their audiences to be, the more they look and sound like members of a different species. We’ve been witnessing a lot of this phenomenon over the conference season, which drew to its unlamented end this week.

Take Ed Miliband (OK, I’d rather not, either). For the great majority of listeners, of course, the most significant omission from his speech to his party’s annual gathering was his failure to mention the deficit. But as for me, shallow creature that I am, I was more struck by his omission of the letter T from the words ‘what’ and ‘whatever’.

After all, it’s just about possible to believe it was through sheer forgetfulness that he left out any reference to the awkward question of our national debt, still increasing at more than £100 billion a year towards an unimaginable £1.5 trillion.

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Ed Miliband could be forgiven for forgetting the national debt from his conference speech, but not the letter 'T'

Many of us have our senior moments — and if I were foolish enough to set myself the pointlessly showy-off task of committing a 75-minute speech to memory, I dare say I would forget chunks of it, too (although I grant you that since the Labour leader also failed to mention immigration, the other subject on which his party is weakest, the slip begins to smell distinctly fishy and Freudian).

But none of us, surely, could conceivably forget that the words ‘what’ and ‘whatever’ each include a T. So it can only have been a deliberate decision by Mr Miliband — who, odd though his diction may be, has often shown himself capable of pronouncing both words in their entirety — to omit that consonant when he was addressing his comrades in Manchester.

‘Wo izzit, wo other things give us comfort and security in life?’ he asked. And, again: ‘I’m not talking about the powerful and the privileged, those who do well wo’ever the weather. I’m talking about families like yours.’

Think of the comedian Catherine Tate’s character, Lauren ‘Am I Bovvered’ Cooper, and you’ll get the general idea.

There are no prizes for guessing why he opted for the glottal stop. He was trying to present himself as a man of the people, and to distract his audience’s attention from the fact that he is a property millionaire from a very comfortable middle-class family (albeit the family of a workers’ revolutionary, dedicated to overthrowing our property and inheritance laws and just about every institution that makes Britain British).

For me, as I suspect for many of his audience, he succeeded only in accentuating his privileged background, coming across as a patronising member of the chattering classes who believes that Labour supporters are frankly rather common people, my dear, who like to be spoken to in a common accent.

In this respect, if perhaps no other, Mr Miliband can truly claim to be the heir to Blair — that ultimate vocal chameleon, who has always adjusted his accent according to his audience, from Morningside for the Scots to mockney for EastEnders, the Queen’s English for the Inns of Court and a mid-Atlantic twang for his vastly lucrative lectures in the U.S.

Mind you, this bleedin’ bonkers vice is by no means confined to Labour politicians. Over the past fortnight, the Tory and Lib Dem conference platforms have also been littered with Ts and aitches, elaborately dropped by upper-middle class orators attempting to crank down their accents by a social notch or two.

In fairness, I ought to record that one exception was George Osborne, who seems wisely to have ditched his clunking experiment with mockney, which exposed him to such cruel ridicule last year (all right, I was among the many mockers). Perhaps next year he’ll take another step towards rejoining the human race by abandoning his new Venusian hairstyle.

In the same spirit of charity, I am even inclined to acquit the ludicrous Nick Clegg, who seldom tries to disguise his prosperous bourgeois background as a pampered product of my old public school.

However, I do wish someone would tell him that there’s an E in the word ‘create’. Or am I the only one who bridles every time he speaks of ‘crating’ apprenticeships, ‘crating’ opportunity and his desire to ‘crate’ legal targets for clean air and water?

But as for the many middle-class MPs who appear to believe they’ll win hearts and minds by aping the accents of less privileged voters, a survey reported in yesterday’s paper confirms my long-held belief that they’re barking up quite the wrong tree.

George Osborne could take a step towards rejoining the human race by abandoning his Venusian hairstyle

If they want to win friends and influence people, suggests the study of accents commissioned by the dating website eHarmony.co.uk, they should stick to the Received Pronunciation of old BBC newsreels, which apparently remains the most trusted of the lot.

Indeed, the Queen’s English emerged from a field of 19 regional and international accents as the one most associated with nine out of ten positive character traits — including honesty, reliability, charm, intelligence and sophistication. The only category in which it failed to come top was humour, where the winner was Geordie, closely followed by Liverpudlian and Irish.

So it seems that the likes of David Cameron and Boris Johnson may have been wise all along to parade their Etonian accents, with no attempt to sound prolier-than-thou.

Equally, MPs of an earlier age, who took pains to crank their accents up a social notch or two, instead of down, may have had the right idea. Think of Roy Jenkins, Margaret Thatcher or Ted Heath.

They knew that British voters understand the aspiration to move up through the class system, while they don’t like being patronised by upper-middle class politicians who try to sound like horny-handed sons of toil.

All of which brings me to a similar device used by modern politicians to persuade us that they’re ordinary blokes, in touch with the downtrodden masses: their growing tendency to pepper their public pronouncements with swear-words — something their predecessors would never have dreamt of in front of a mass audience.

On this charge, I can’t acquit Mr Cameron or Mr Johnson. Indeed, I winced during the Scottish referendum campaign when the Prime Minister pleaded with the electorate not to vote Yes simply to ‘give the effing Tories a kicking’.

All right, he didn’t utter the f-word in full — as we journalists, like fishwives and troopers, do among ourselves. But by using that most un-Prime Ministerial of words in public, he made clear that when he thinks of Scots, he thinks of foul-mouthed squaddies and drunks brawling in the Gorbals.

When I think of Scots, I think of my ancient and revered mother-in-law. Like her well brought-up compatriots, she would never let a profanity cross her lips and she doesn’t like it a bit when she hears one.

Once again it is down to Boris Johnson, who has no interest in the current craze of sounding prolier-than thou

I thought of her again when that nice young Danny Alexander tried to sound like a man of the people at the Lib Dem conference. His party had done ‘a bloody good job for this country’, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury told a televised fringe meeting, while crediting the Tories with the economic recovery ‘does p*** me off’.

As my colleague Ephraim Hardcastle observed, you’d think that a laddie from God-fearing West Highland stock might think twice before causing unnecessary offence to the many voters who still care about such things.

As for Boris Johnson’s outburst on a lunchtime TV programme against a BBC reporter, Tim Donovan, my dear mother-in-law would have fainted clean away if she’d heard it. If she’s reading this, she’d better look away now, because what the London Mayor said was: ‘Stuff Donovan and his f****** b*******!’