Tory ex-PM John Major was ridiculed yesterday after launching a bizarre attack blaming Labour for creating a British ruling class packed with privately educated and wealthy people.

The Conservative grandee - prime minister from 1990-7 following the fall of Margaret Thatcher - reportedly complained to a weekend constituency meeting: "In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class.

"I find that truly shocking."

Apparently oblivious to his own party's historic role in defending ruling-class privilege - and the dominance of privately schooled millionaires in the current Cabinet - state school-educated Mr Major accused Labour of ending social mobility and leaving a "Victorian divide between stagnation and aspiration."

But Communist Party of Britain general secretary Rob Griffiths said yesterday that it was "a little strange" that Mr Major hadn't noticed that the ruling class were ruling Britain when he was in office.

"People from a very small band at the top of society dominate business, the Civil Service, the armed forces, political establishment, judiciary - the people who run these parts of society are drawn from a very narrow band at the top of the pyramid," Mr Griffiths told the Morning Star.

"We might have expected a Labour government to do something about it, but such social mobility as we had - and it was always exaggerated - came to an end in the Thatcher years not the Labour years."