What is a metropolitan? Who is in the metropolitan elite? While plainly you can be a member of an elite without being metropolitan, is it possible to be a “metropolitan” without being in the “elite”? (Not really; the metropole doesn’t really want you unless you have money.) What marks you out as a metropolitan, and is there any chance that you could slough it off?

The Labour party has now lost two of its potential leaders to the curse of the metropolitan – Chuka Umunna stood down as a result of press intrusion, the greatest extent of which so far to emerge is a piece in the Daily Mail about the fact that he’s a member of a club with eel-skin walls (this is about as metropolitan elite as you get). Tristram Hunt didn’t have to stand down, having failed to find enough support in the first place, owing to his perceived membership of this clique.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Critic of the metropolitan elite: David Lammy. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

The Labour MPs David Lammy and Simon Danczuk have both been vocal in the past, and more so since the loss of the election, about the real source of the party’s problems; Danczuk said last June that the party had been “hijacked” by the metropolitan elite. “I’ve been the one who’s banging on about this,” he says equably, “this north London elite dominating the Labour party. Ed Miliband captured that perfectly; unhealthily for Labour, in my opinion. They’re too politically correct, they have an idealised view of what working people like or think is important. I often think they see working people as being concerned primarily about economic issues, so they talk about redistribution, but they forget or don’t understand the cultural aspects of working people’s lives.”

Lammy, who said something similar in 2013, – “The Labour party can’t just be the party of Primrose Hill and Parliament Hill” – picks up this point about politicians, their orthodoxy and vocabulary. “They all live in London, they live in certain areas, they go to the same restaurants, they go to the same dinner parties, they all know each other. The lines feel rehearsed because they’re positions that have been maintained really since these kids were being tutored to pass their verbal reasoning at 11 or 13+. And actually, most people don’t have those codes of behaviour. For a lot of people, it’s not polite to talk about politics, and when they do, it’s kind of messy, and they say the wrong thing, they say the wrong words, it’s edgy and uncomfortable and they fall out over too many glasses ...” He pauses. I love Lammy, but I find it hilarious that he goes on to change “too many glasses of wine” for “too many beers”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Metropolitan: Chuka Umunna. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi

An orthodoxy, a way of talking about things, binds the elite, but there is, of course, more than that – an additional something that makes some individuals scream “metropolitan” while others don’t, an extra dimension that means there is always more packed into this term than wealth and geography. For the sake of Labour’s beating heart, not to mention that of the Conservatives (it may be a little too late for the Lib Dems), we really need to nail down what it means; at least so the ones who can’t avoid the label can own it.

The charge of “metropolitan elitism” from the left vibrates with anger at Labour’s economic liberalism – it is an explosion of rage at these urbane know-alls who love immigration because it makes plumbing cheaper, but never think about what it does to communities where plumbing used to be a really good job. The same charge, from the right, relates more to social liberalism – a resentment of these moneyed cliques in which bohemianism has triumphed, and people who ought to be big and small “c” conservatives are now campaigning in favour of gay marriage and tolerating all kinds of previously insurmountable differences.

Isabel Hardman is the assistant editor of the Spectator, and is regularly accused of being a metropolitan, despite “not having lived inside the M25 since I was four”. “It would come from a Ukipper, and it would be because I’d tweeted something about Farage being vile about people who were HIV positive.” Lammy says: “There is a liberal value set. It’s David Cameron, really: relaxed about gay rights, relaxed about ethnic minorities, socially liberal and also economically liberal, the strange place where the Guardian meets the Times, which is as New Labour as it is Thatcherite. It’s a cosy place, that squeezes out people who haven’t got the money to be included in that conversation.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Metropolitan elitist: David Cameron. Photograph: Rick Findler

Ah, money: before we go there, a note on a curious ellipsis. Chris Roberts, senior lecturer in journalism, media and culture at Roehampton University, describes the evolution of the term: “It’s used interchangeably with ‘cosmopolitan’. It’s like a dirty word. In fact, cosmopolitan is never used any more, and this is used as a substitute while lexically taking on a meaning of its own. Once that meaning would have been a little bit more centre left, and Tories would have backed away from it. Elite might be OK but they didn’t want to be metropolitan. But since the Tory party has been reimagined, that is what they want. It is a woolly term, meaning all things to all people.”

This is particularly marked, for me, in the subtle shift in the association of elitism and tolerance, so that “metropolitan elite” can now also be code for the things that its members will happily tolerate: black or gay people, childless women or trans people. If, in any way, you fall outside Daily Mail-inscribed codes of “normal”, then “metropolitan elite” may be used to describe you, but only if you’re in the political class, because what is really being described is not you personally, but the means by which you will alienate the potential voter who is not a part of the metropolitan elite.

But if the term itself is incredibly loose, that doesn’t mean we don’t understand it. Roberts cites the MP Dan Jarvis, who disappointed many in the Labour party by declining to stand for the leadership. “If you look at the weight he was getting behind him, he’s not part of the metropolitan elite.” Why not? “I don’t know. Ex-army.” Is it the real-ness of the armed forces that protects Jarvis from the taint of urbaneness? Could it be that easy, and does it have to be that hard?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not metropolitan: Dan Jarvis. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex

There is a relationship between our “metropolitan elite” and the “liberal elite” of American politics, a spectre that grew from the start of the century and was most pithily summarised by the US columnist Dave Barry in 2004: “Godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.” David Graeber, an American who teaches anthropology at LSE and was one of the originators of the Occupy movement, describes a subtle cultural difference in the area of leftie elitism: “The anti-intellectualism here is interesting. In America, there is much more of a sense that if you’re from a working-class background, you can’t really become a part of the cultural elite, hence the resentment of those guys. They hate the cultural elite much more than the economic one; you can imagine getting rich, but you know your kid is never going to be opera critic of the New York Times. Here, there is a working-class resentment of working-class people who did get ahead, which you don’t get so much in the US.”

Presidents in the US have to affect a non-Harvard image, whether by wearing cowboy boots or hamming up an accent, but you can be a rich, highly educated Democrat without betraying the roots of the party. The Labour party, by contrast, was set up to represent people who weren’t of the establishment, yet has been colonised by the establishment: it now falls upon its leaders to affect authenticity and glottal stops, play down the PPE degree and play up the football allegiance, to overcome this minor impediment that their understanding of hardship is entirely theoretical. I sometimes think, even though “metropolitan elite” is often code for anti-intellectualism, the biggest anti-intellectuals in all of this are the politicians themselves, who think that presenting a credible ordinariness means never seeming too clever or too educated. The early pioneers of the Labour movement would, I like to think (hard to check), have said that learning was the last thing anyone needed to be embarrassed about.

Graeber offers this analysis of the friction that I find elegant to the point of beauty. “I’m trying to figure out this country. Since the election I’ve been wondering: what the hell is going on here? My conclusion is that there’s a basic, fundamental contradiction in the nature of the British economy. What is England’s export product? Supposedly, it’s finance. To some degree it’s as lieutenant to America’s empire, but that’s limited. We have a real-estate bubble on the basis of the finance system, because every single super-rich person in the entire world has to have a house in London, so they’re selling bits of London and the south-east.

“Why is it appealing? On the one hand, you have a creative, subservient working-class. You get the best servants here. Second of all, it’s security; you have political safety, whereas if you come from Bahrain, Singapore, Macau, in those places something could still happen. The historical defeat of the working classes has now become the UK’s export product. So people recognise that, but of course they resent it, so they take it out on the poor foreigners rather than the rich ones. Then the metropolitan elite preach tolerance, and of course they are hated; they are hated as the brokers of that system.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Non-metropolitan elite voice: Nigel Farage. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

Whenever the subject ever comes up – when a voice of authenticity such as Nigel Farage (whom the political thinker Mark Fisher calls “the people’s stock-bloker”) castigates, explicitly or by inference, the inauthenticity of the political class – there is an urbane rush by the comment class to own up to membership of this embarrassing club. Often, that frank mea culpa – “I am rich, I am connected, I can afford to live in London, I did go to Oxford” – becomes indistinguishable from plain showing off, and the openness turns to embarrassment, as though the music has stopped in a club and you are still shouting. If everybody with a platform is part of the elite, and the elite has taken the platform, then only a putsch will do – this is a very Russell Brand direction. In the meantime, pending the revolution, the metropolitan elite is in this airless space, understanding its distance from the “non-elite” but not knowing how to bridge it without committing metropolitan-elite suicide.

Lammy says: “When Labour lost the election, I felt myself in the stages of grief. Last weekend, I was really angry. I was really angry with Ed Miliband and the leadership of the party. What set me off was, I took my nine-year-old to his Sunday league football match and the parents of his friends came up to me – they were mainly black and ethnic minorities, first-generation immigrants. They were bewildered. Really bewildered. They could not understand how Labour had done quite so badly. And these people are cleaners, security guards, home carers, dinner ladies, nurses – they are absolutely the people who will experience the harshness. The truth is, people in the metropolitan elite, and that includes Ed Miliband, and me, and you, we will be better off under the Tories. These people will be screwed.”

The meaning of “metropolitan elite” is not fixed. It will change in the mouth of whoever says it, and it will take on the shape of the person to whom, for whatever combination of reasons, it is thrown at and sticks. But the anger is real: parliament, as the last century understood it, represented the people to the state. Parliament now represents the state to the people. And maybe “metropolitan” is a way to say that, and to give it a face.

• This article was amended on 22 May 2015. An earlier version said David Graeber “teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths”. He taught there until 2013, when he moved to LSE to become its professor of anthropology.