We know you're one of us, Tony. But who are we?

Some little bird or bloody great gull has whispered in Mr Blair's ear and told him to get personal. Stop all the political malarkey and tell the punters what they really want to hear. So today in The Sun you can read "When Tony met Cherie - The Blair Love Story".

Being New Labour means presumably never having to say you're sorry. Ever since Sue Lawley went for his weak spot on Desert Island Discs, Blair has been making a concerted effort to show a more human side. It doesn't stop the punters being suspicious that one day he will reveal the reptile inside him like something out of Dark Skies.

In "opening his heart" to The Sun, Blair comes across as a man both sustained by and deeply involved with his family. He is concerned about the effects of his work on his children and wife. If the ultimate sacrifice had to be made, he says, he would choose his family over politics.

All this is fine, until this extraordinary man tries to play the ordinary bloke and spouts on about chippies and pints down the Labour club and watching Gladiators and Noel's House Party and eating fish suppers in front of the telly. I am sure he does some of these things, I am sure he's a good bloke really, I am sure he's one of us. By the way, who are we?

I only ask because by ticking off what he imagines the signifiers of working-class authenticity in The Sun, are we supposed to forget Fettes and Granita and the Oratory and Cherie's salary or are we supposed to assume that Britain is a genuinely classless place and Blair's sudden attempt at downward mobility is a graphic illustration that class is but another item in the ragbag of identities for politicians to play with.

If so, class has moved from being something firmly attached to material circumstances to something purely cultural. No wonder the Marxists get so vulgar. The proletariat now defines itself not by what it does but what it likes. Class is defined not by what work you do but what you do when you are not working - by one's leisure activities. It seems strange that Blair should choose to play this game, as it is quite clear to anyone with half a brain that there is no way he could be defined as working class. Indeed if class, in the old sense of the word, is needed, then John Prescott is wheeled in. Whereas Ginger Rogers gave Fred Astaire sex, Astaire gave her class. The exchange between Blair and Prescott is, I take it, a classier one altogether.

Yet if Blair is a working-class wannabe then he is not alone. Popular culture is loaded with all sorts of men, who drag up in working-class garb, who claim authenticity by reference to their trivial pursuits. In the space of a few years football has been made both more respectable, dare I say bourgeois, as well as remaining the ultimate symbol of a collective and common culture. Rid of its hooligans, it is now a sport with which the whole family can become involved. Likewise if you are Oasis or Chris Evans or any old footballer then a working-class yob is something to be - truly heroic. Until, that is, something like Gazza happens and then a great deal of denial about what working-class masculinity may entail takes place. The Sun itself had to tread this fine line by describing wife-beating not as low class but as low life.

New Labour is about a concerted effort to appeal to the middle classes. The paradox, of course, is that it has occurred at a time when that class feels itself beleaguered and endangered. Downsizing and deregulation has meant that the uncertainties of redundancy and short-term contracts which belonged to traditional working-class life are now felt by the professional classes. The workers who have experienced their rights dwindling away have been middle class. What they took for granted, from pensions to health care to decent schools to jobs for life, has been swept away. And they have been the most vocal about something which has actually affected all classes.

The result is a society in which in some areas class is demarcated more than ever before, while in others its existence is completely denied. This contradiction is not new, but it is being played out in a different way than before. Thatcher appealed to the aspirational voter. Upward mobility could be guaranteed by property owning, the purchase of another microwave, enough money to eat out occasionally. It was the ultimate from of privatisation. Society, a questionable concept, may not get better but the individual could improve their lives immeasurably .

New Labour, despite its hard-headed realism, also offers an aspirational fantasy, but it is one is in which the shared, public bonds between individuals also get upgraded. The world will be a safer, cleaner, kinder place. The language of class solidarity is dead for them because it implicitly means class conflict. No one must be alienated. Sadly, the person who best embodies classlessness is still John Major.

This post-modern version of class is free-floating. In its most positive manifestation it has managed to detach itself from the old, constraining, definitions, which simply did not describe life as it was lived. The negative aspect of this - the grabbing of the attributes of other classes - appears a desperate sham. Those secure in their positions do not have to pretend to be one of the lads.

Blair, meanwhile, has to be so many things to so many people, one begins to wonder if he has cloned himself, or whether one person can really rush between Granita and the Labour club, gala dinners and the footie, all the while demanding balsamic vinegar on his scraps. His tastes may be genuinely down-market, and we have no reason to believe that they are not, but his lifestyle isn't. Why pretend otherwise?

Voters surely vote for politicians whom they realise are not the same as them. The fetish of ordinariness, which always means blokishness, is a peculiar phenomenon. Superwoman Cherie is reduced to subservient wife, his children to little symbols of normality.

Politics has learnt too much from advertising. It now little more than a form of niche marketing. Gaps are spotted, focus groups observed through two -way mirrors, and politicians' personalities, dress and opinions are manufactured to fill the gaps.

When Clare Short with her image undone finds more favour than any number of other female MPs, no one apart from the image makers themselves are surprised. You see in the midst of all this is a desire for something decent, honest and true, attributes which are not the prerogative of any one social class. The day Blair stands up and says it loud "I'm middle class and I'm proud" is the day we might begin to trust him. He's been looking through two-way mirrors for too long. A vision of middle-class heroism is nothing to be ashamed of. A working-class hero may still be something to be. But only if you have no other choice and only when Saturday comes.