Ooh! After a period of discreet and fuming silence - after all, it would have seemed contrary to bash David Cameron immediately soon after the Tories' good showing in the local elections - the rightwingers have let it all out.
John Hayes, the chairman of the Cornerstone group of Conservative MPs (aka "the headbangers" and "Tombstone", to their parliamentary colleagues) has launched an attack on the "A-list" of Tory candidates for the next general election.
Half of them are women and a number come from ethnic minorities or are gay. No doubt conscious that criticising them on that basis would be unwise, Hayes instead attacks their lack of political experience and metropolitan bias:
"The idea that we can parachute insubstantial and untested candidates with little knowledge of the local scene into key seats to win the confidence of people they seek to represent is the bizarre theory of people who spend too much time with the pseuds and posers of London's chichi set and not enough time in normal Britain," he said.
Evidently Hayes was unconvinced by Francis Maude's insistence last week that the A-list is not a collection of "mincing metrosexuals". Who, after all, could be more chichi than a mincing metrosexual? "Do you know, he spends every Saturday in the Conran Shop!"
According to the OED, chichi-ness ("fussiness, excessive refinement, pretentiousness, affected ways") is nearly a century old. The first recorded use of the term was in 1908 and referred to malingering actresses, canapes and "elaborate compliments". Nancy Mitford used it to describe a pair of gold hairbrushes.
The New Statesman said chichi restaurants were the kind of places where Frenchmen entertained high-class prostitutes. After 1950, the term seemed to take on decidedly suburban connotations: "going in gangs to those chichi clubs at Maidenhead".
But the expression has fallen out of use recently. Perhaps it needs reclaiming as a proper noun for the new generation of Tory candidates. After all, chichi-ness is really nothing more than social aspiration - and what could be more Tory than that?
