Years ago I appeared on Newsnight with Jacob Rees-Mogg and we had a little barney – I think I accused him of being both a snob and a nob, and he, taking umbrage, asked me to explain what defined these derogatory appellations. I think I told him that it all basically came down to cufflinks; that in the great index of social classification – inscribed up there on a Laputa-like cloudly domain – the wearing of cufflinks really marked a man off as a snob and a nob.

Years later I don't really stand by the cufflink classification – I've acquired a pair of my own, although they don't really fit; I do, however, stand by my estimation of Rees-Mogg, who's made the headlines again this week with another of his egregious slurs against the left, damning us all as "socialist Yahoos".

Clearly at whichever charitable foundation of a fee-paying school Rees-Mogg attended, they didn't give their pupils much of a grounding in Swift's oeuvre. While it's true that when Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms he is repelled by the de-evolved humans that they call Yahoos – who are brutish, hairy, lacking in personal hygiene and seemingly illiterate – but he is equally repelled by the Houyhnhnms themselves, who he finds to be cold-blooded in their extreme rationality, unfeeling, and for all their culture and aristocratic bearing, the most insufferable snobs.

The beauty of Swift's satiric masterpiece is, of course, that almost anyone can find the outline of a target with its gallery of grotesques – one that approximates to the stereotype he or she wishes to aim at. But Swift's genius was far greater than that: he understood that at root the satirist's aim is to provide ammunition for those who are oppressed by all or any aspects of the social order with which pelt their oppressors. Somewhere in the land of the Houyhnhnms there will always be Rees-Mogg, whinnying nonsense, and surrounded by a baying crowd of very human Yahoos. I know whose side I'm on.

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