High life | 21 April 2016

My, my, the rich are under attack everywhere, and I thank God the Panama Papers didn’t include the name of the poor little Greek boy. Legality being my middle name, I took legal advice and stayed away from offshore trusts and shell companies as soon as my daddy died. Steer clear of Mossack Fonseca, they advised; everything’s gotta be on the up and up, which means that I now depend on the munificence of my children and their mother for walking-around money — and that includes change for coffee and a pack of fags now and then. Mind you, it beats being on a Panama list and having all those hacks poring over my not-so-hard-earned moolah.

What bothers me is how the word rich has now become a pejorative term. Even my friend Alexander Chancellor used it as an insult a couple of weeks ago when he wrote in these pages ‘written by a rich, fat businessman….’ which immediately sets up the reader to dislike the person he’s referring to. What I’d like to remind Alexander is that it was a rich, fat businessman who gave him the editorship of The Spectator 41 years ago, one Henry Keswick. Mind you, it was yet another contributor, Toby Young, who pointed out that the Guardian jackals cackling over the Panama Papers were themselves the beneficiaries of tax-exempt shell companies in the Cayman Islands. If that’s not hypocrisy with a capital ‘H’, my name is Goldman Sachs.

Where wealth is concerned, we’re now back in the early Seventies, before Maggie came into the picture and hand-bagged the envious class warriors to oblivion. Corbyn and his motley crew — this Tom Watson character should be tarred and feathered for attacking people who cannot defend themselves, always under the protection of parliamentary immunity — hate anybody who’s got a hint of wealth, forgetting the fact that no matter how hard we try, we can’t all sink to Watson’s and Corbyn’s level.