What Chris Grayling needed was a spangly suit. The Shadow Home Secretary has the cringing mien of a man who, having received one fearsome bollocking, is anxious to avoid another. But his speech on Wednesday was like a discount supermarket advert, with Mr Grayling filling the Lurex trousers of “Fluff” Freeman, shouting out the crazeee bargains in store. Except that in this through-the- looking-glass Tory new world, stuff would be twice as dear.

So roll up for Grayling’s Great Deals: “Four-pack of super-strength lager UP £1.33!” “Super-strength cider — DOUBLE in price!” “Alcopops — large bottle — a soaraway £1.50 MORE!” Clearly he wanted to show command of detail, how much he’d stiff us on Special Brew to the exact threepennorth. But it conveyed what the caring Tories, with their Iain Duncan Smith understand-don’t- condemn social policy unit, can no longer say out loud: their visceral loathing of the British underclass.

It was only tramp juice, hoody hooch and slag sauce that he will ramp up, not the tipples of respectable folk, the warm ales and clanking cases from the Wine Society. To make that clear, Mr Grayling added an anxious caveat about protecting “those parts of the country with traditional producers”. It was designed, one supposes, to reassure the beardy brewers of Old Scrotum’s Particular, but seemed to suggest that it is perfectly fine to get sozzled on super-strength cider as long as you do so in Somerset.

Rummaging around in the nation’s drinks cabinet and tutting at our bottles of Thunderbird doesn’t sound terribly small government to me. Particularly as Mr Grayling seems to miss the fundamental point: to “call time on the drinks that fuel antisocial behaviour” you’d have to put super-strength tax on all booze, like big-government Sweden. Inflating the cost of premium lagers or syrupy cocktails won’t make the antisocial sober — but just encourage them to shop around.

I decided to check out Sainsbury’s booze aisles in the mode of someone with great thirst and little cash. Excitingly, my own under-age teenage fave Babycham — “the happiest drink in the world” — is still a snip at £3.18 but, at only 6 per cent proof, it would take more than four dainty bottles to make you feel like smashing up a bus shelter. Special Brew (two litres for £6 at 9 per cent proof) seemed worthy of Chris Grayling’s opprobrium until I spied this week’s soaraway offer: £7 for two bottles of nice Chilean chardonnay, 11.5 per cent proof. Neck that outside the community centre and you’d be in pole position for an ASBO.

But really there is only one winner, endorsed by maudlin Russians and Scandinavian suicides for centuries: vodka. Just £6 a litre and EU regulations dictate that it must be 37.5 per cent proof minimum. Mr Grayling insisted that he would root out shopkeepers selling alcohol below cost price. But the point of vodka is that, as it is little more than distilled potato juice, it costs pennies to produce.

I had dinner once with the director of a premium vodka company who told me that around 90 per cent of the price tag was branding. Artful advertising — Smirnoff’s surrealism, Absolut’s urban cool — and sponsorship of A-list events give an identity and aura of sophistication to a liquid that is little better than what a Latvian peasant brews in his bath.

Vodka has no vintage years, no rare and exquisite single-potato variety. The most that companies can say of their product is that they filter it ten times, which seems like boasting that they wash their bottles properly. Ultimately you can charge only so much for something so basic: in the boom years fancy brands could only add value by selling magnums encrusted with Swarovski crystals to drunken bankers. Remove all the frills and you have “basics-range” escapism in a plastic bottle.

Vodka is the drink that sums up our century. It is conquering the world, overtaking Scotch to become Britain’s favourite spirit this year; it has seduced gin-drinking India, whisky-loving China. Because it is all things to all people, tasteless, shape- shifting, you can customise it into an alcopop or a Cosmopolitan. It is male or female, young or old; it is declassé.

Vodka shows the fallacy of trying to separate the drinks that cause antisocial behaviour from those that don’t. Vodka fuels brawls on Sunderland council estates and at the Serpentine summer ball.

But Mr Grayling wasn’t trying to demonstrate that he’s tabloid-tough on crime. He was saying that we don’t just hate your violence and lawlessness, we hate your disgusting, common drinks. As the artist Grayson Perry remarked when I interviewed him this week, it is now taste that defines class, not economics.

The Tories are exquisitely aware of the social significance of booze. This conference they were so paranoid about being seen quaffing champagne (is any other drink “quaffed”?) amid the recession that their chairman, Eric Pickles, sternly told all delegates “I want to see less champagne bubbles and more bubbling activity.” They seem mortified that a party member, having guzzled a bottle of champers in an hotel, allegedly tried to steal another. Perhaps they were worried we might remember that champagne is a key cause of upper-class antisocial behaviour or, as the accused called it, “high spirits”.

In particular the Tories feared that if we spied David Cameron knocking back Bolly we might have a giddy flashback to him hosing down Boris Johnson with a jeroboam in their Bullingdon Club days. Indeed, seeing her husband with flute in hand at the Spectator party, Sam Cam ticked Dave off and made him promise to switch to a more democratic drink.

What the Tories haven’t appreciated is how naff champagne has become. The buzz marketing phrase of the last decade was affordable luxury. Just as low-grade cashmere is available in Bhs and the rock star’s drug, cocaine, is snorted by hairdressers, so champagne is sold in every corner shop. Once confined to the wedding toast or Formula One triumph, acidic, banging-hangover fizz is now so ubiquitous that I’ve come to agree with Christopher Hitchens that it ranks among the four most overrated things in the world, with lobster, picnics and anal sex.

From brawls outside Essex night clubs to the public-school holidaying hoorays in Rock, Cornwall, public drunkenness is a disgrace that knows no social boundaries. Chris Grayling might do well to remember that before he declares a glass war.

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