What does Mark Carney have in common with Christian Gross, erstwhile manager of Spurs?

The answer is not that they are foreigners charged with the impossible task of introducing adequacy into fifth-rate organizations. It's that both used the tube on their first day at work.

Here, though, the comparison ends. Whereas Gross was ridiculed for doing so, Carney was not.The difference highlights one of the big dilemmas facing public figures - be they football managers, politicians or central bankers.

What I mean is that they must try and send two very different - indeed, contradictory - signals. On the one hand, they must show that they are competent men in charge of events. On the other, they must show that they are in touch with people.

This is why Carney succeeded where Gross failed. Carney's technocratic credentials are secure (but give it time) whereas Gross's were not, at least in the eyes of a parochial media. So, whilst Carney's use of the tube humanized him, Gross's made him look like a buffoon.

Gross was of course not the last man to make this mistake. When Osborne tweeted that picture of him eating a burger, he was trying to look like a normal bloke. This would have worked if, like Carney, he previously built a reputation for competence. But because he hadn't he just looked silly.

These legitimation signals account for a large part of public affairs. Summit meetings, for example, are not about doing business - that can be done by conference calls and the "sherpas" - but about sending signals. They allow politicians to show that they are not trivial petty-minded nobodies being buffetted by events, but are instead statesmen bestriding the global stage. They are, as Walter Bagehot would have said, a dignified rather than efficient part of the constitution.

It's in this context that we should interpret the dilemma facing the Labour party. On the one hand, it wants to signal that it's in touch with the people. But on the other hand, some of us are hoping for signals of economic competence. The problem is that the two are mutually exclusive. Being in touch with the people requires a tough line on benefit claimants and immigrants, and the pretence that public borrowing is a big problem. Economic competence, however, requires the opposite.

For some of us, the Labour party is too much like Christian Gross and not enough like Mark Carney.

People on the populist end of this debate, such as David Goodhart and Simon Danczuk, at least have the wit to realize this mutual exclusivity between competence cues and populism. When Goodhart says "it is also not enough to sit in central London looking at databases, you also have to talk to real people" he's recognizing that scientific evidence collides with populism. And when Danczuk sneers at Owen for being "privileged", he's inviting viewers to think that anyone intelligent enough to get into Oxford (a low bar) must be out of touch. The same sneer, of course, is used when people aware of the economics of immigration are called a "metropolitian elite."

I say all this for two reasons. First, to repeat my point that populism (or perhaps even democracy) is incompatible with good policy-making. Second, I suggest that what we're starting to see here is the revival of a culture war between "eggheads" and populists. The fact that the populists are often themselves posh - David Goodhart went to Eton and Nigel Farage to Dulwich - merely vindicates Marx's point that when history repeats itself, the second time is farce.