Kennington News

An English friend who runs his own company was at a City dinner. Back home he tore off his black tie and sighed to his wife: “Well, I think I was probably the only man in the room who paid any tax at all.”

There is now a zeitgeisty sense that the tax burden that has settled like an iron yoke across our shoulders floats like a cloak of gossamer over the super-rich – they can’t see it, they can’t feel it, they hardly even know it’s there, because many of them don’t pay much tax. As a result, even they are hearing the distant rumble of tumbrils.

Private equity supremo Nicholas Ferguson admitted that he pays proportionately less tax than his cleaner, and Sir Ronald Cohen, founder of the private equity group Apax, warned that the growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of us “is something we should be concerned about . . . When economic situations get bad, it takes a spark to ignite a violent reaction”.

Well, we middle classes are in the midst of this violent reaction, as we worry about the next rise in interest rates, flinch at our gas and water bills and council tax, and negotiate small mortgages for each shop at Sainsbury’s.

While life seems to get more and more expensive, the bourgeoisie are developing murderous feelings for the fat cats at the top of the tree. The new battleground is between the mass of the middle classes, struggling to afford the services and comforts they were brought up to expect, and the micro-class of the super-rich, who are using loopholes and the 10% rates of capital gains tax to turn everything they touch to gold.

And as a result, never in the field of British journalism have so few multi-millionaires been roasted by so many jobbing, middle-income columnists.

According to figures from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, only 8,000 people in this country earn £1m or more in income a year, or equivalent to just 0.0001% of the population.

And as for all the buccaneer billionaires we hear about, in 2004-5, according to the taxman, only seven Britons out of an adult population of 48m earned more than £1 billion.

According to one cross private equity magnate I spoke to for this article, the British have a Marxist tendency to assume that people only grow rich at the expense of others; we lionise Beckham and Lewis Hamilton and even Branson but can’t celebrate capitalism. He added, dismissively, that Cohen’s remarks were an attempt to “curry favour with Brown”. As he spoke, I began to doubt my own revulsion about the huge personal profits being made by men like him from selling companies bought with borrowed money, with only a puny tithe going to the exchequer.

But then I came to my senses again. The Revenue can only capture information about folk who declare their income and who are resident here for tax purposes. If you look at The Sunday Times Rich List, you realise the extent of the nondomiciled for tax-purposes scam.

According to the Rich List, which estimates wealth rather than income, this country is home to 65 billionaires, and 151 men and women worth £500m, which sort of suggests, if you think back to how few of those appear to be UK taxpayers, that London has become not just a haven for the super-rich, but a tax haven.

Which means that we suckers in the middle classes are paying for the services, the roads, the water and the hospitals of the private equity barons who have “domiciled” elsewhere and enrich themselves at our expense.

Look, nobody is more in favour of very rich men than I am. But those chiselling Croesuses who take advantage of the nondom tax rules to avoid paying the full whack . . . that’s just not on. It’s cheating the rest of us.

- I was booked to appear as a “self-confessed slummy mummy” on Richard and Judy last week, which was fine. I am proud to be beta, and allergic to the neurotic mothers who privately tutor their privately educated children, and the smug mums who brag that little Cosima, aged two, so enjoys her daily two-hour instruction in the Albanian nose-flute (there is a brilliant blog on all this at www.timesonline.typepad.com/ alphamummy).

Anyway, I was conveyed to Kennington by 3.15pm for a show that goes out at 5. I sat around for a bit eating fruit and then Katie-Hopkins-off-The-Apprentice stalked into the green room in teetering heels and the skinniest of skinny white jeans. Then the time passed very quickly, of course, because I remain just as obsessed with Katie as everyone else, and sat spellbound and speechless before her – she’s all attitude and astonishing blue eyes. I asked her how old her children were, and she said, “One and two. No, er, two and three”, which was impressive.

Then we had hair and make-up – actually, Katie had hair, make-up and wardrobe, on the grounds that I was the beta mother and she was the alpha female. Then we went on, and it was all over in a flash.

Next day I thought to hell with it, I’ll take a quick peep at moi on R&J, and settled down to watch the recorded discussion on parenting styles.

And yes, there I was on the sofa wearing skirt, T-shirt and flip-flops. And there was Katie, now in a crocheted navy and white mini-dress, all blonde hair and batting eyelashes. And there were gorgeous Richard and gorgeous Judy, and another guest, Rachel Royce.

And then the camera came in for my close-up, and I sat up, rigid with horror. My bra strap! My cheap, scoop-neck T-shirt had slipped as I lounged on the sofa, and the strap was poking rudely and dingily out, and catching the harsh studio lights.

I was talking about how I never went through school satchels in case I found one of those dread letters crumpled up that says, “Oliver is a praying mantis in class assembly and will need full costume and hand-knitted mandibles”, or “Can children bring sun-hats, sun-cream, written consent forms, packed lunch, a clipboard, coloured pencils for our trip to the zoo”.

But all I could see was the bra strap, and weep. I could hardly focus on what I was saying about how beta parenting makes for relaxed, rounded children and alpha parenting produces nervous wrecks, because face it, I had just spent two hours in hair and make-up to look like a slob.

I needn’t have opened my mouth to say a word about being a slummy mummy – my bra strap said it all.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk