Politics: The cost of giving

David Cameron was in a foul mood on Monday night. ‘Cash for Cameron’, the scandal about a Tory treasurer trying to lure donors with the prospect of dinner in the Camerons’ Downing Street flat if they coughed up £250,000, is precisely the kind of story that gets under his skin. He knows that it matters, but hates the fact that it does. Part of him thinks that it is all beneath his prime-ministerial dignity.

It also irritates him that he is receiving little credit for being more transparent than any of his predecessors. He tetchily said to colleagues that evening that ‘if I am anymore transparent, I’ll be telling the press when I see my own family’. But, deep down, he realises the potency of any story about the Tories and a moneyed elite.

The Tories’ Achilles’ heel is that, according to a recent poll, two thirds of voters believe that they are the party of the rich. In recent decades, the Tories have tried to get around this problem by choosing leaders with humble origins: Edward Heath was the son of a maid, Margaret Thatcher a grocer’s daughter, John Major’s dad a music-hall performer. William Hague’s parents ran a small soft drinks business and Michael Howard’s father was a Romanian immigrant. For 40 years, the only exception to this rule was Iain Duncan Smith, from a military family.

But Cameron, educated at Eton and Oxford, marks a return to the party being headed by a scion of privilege. He has always been sensitive on this point. Indeed, his unease about cutting the top rate of tax in the Budget can be traced back to his fear that it would let the class genie out of the bottle. Now, this has been followed by a story that is almost perfectly designed to reinforce the impression that the Tories are a party of and for the rich.