I have a political confession to make: a weakness for Zac Goldsmith. We met last winter in Sipson, that village of the damned beneath the planned third runway at Heathrow. As he strode across a field in his hand-me-down Savile Row suit, angular, very tall, exquisite manners, he resembled an aristocratic landowner from a gentler age. Later, while he droned on about dwindling fish stocks — quietly, with that Diana-ish drop of the head — I felt the ugliness of the pub, the instant coffee, the Nobby’s Nuts.
Zac’s cheekbones and principles seemed too high for our dirty, modern world.
I am not alone. Unlikely left-wing friends — straight women, gay men — love a bit of political posh. It is not merely because Goldsmith is beautiful, which he is, spawned from a gene pool of charismatic men and dazzling girls, but romantic too.
When an Eton education truly takes, it bestows an aura of otherworldliness, an appearance of getting what you want without pushing, being above the scramble and petty change-counting of commerce, Conservatism as nostalgia, Conservatism that actually wants to conserve something.
At the London Film Festival last month Boris Johnson, on stage at his mayor’s gala movie, made a quite spectacular balls-up in his introduction. So he dug out some Keats, a bit of Greek, raked his hair, remarked about his own manifest uselessness. It was Just William, Bunter, Molesworth! The crowd — liberal, artsy and mostly, I’d bet, non-Tory voters — chuckled with pleasure.
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A fortnight later I watched David Cameron give the Hugo Young Lecture at that reichstag of right-on thought, the Guardian newspaper offices. Afterwards outside, the assembled liberal Brahmins were mostly flushed pink, a tiny bit in love. It was not the power of Mr Cameron’s oratory — which was adequate — but his presence, his spookily smooth, almost CGI skin, his manner of quiet command: not so much a statesman as a philosopher prince.
Class war is back, we are told this week. To the barricades against the bankers and the RBS bonuses! Let our If . . . fantasies play out on the playing fields of Eton. But really, however much John Prescott’s blood is up for a fight, it will be a short-lived skirmish at best. Class war was roughly a century of our history. We are at heart still a feudal people, ever waiting for that once and future king.
In Britain it takes a public school boy to play the classless political everyman. The Americans’ fantasy leader is Jed Bartlet, a folksy intellectual. Ours is Hugh Grant in Love Actually: posh, repressed, self-deprecating, yet principled enough to square up to a bad US president and say no.
The principled posh can declare themselves incorruptible: Mr Goldsmith has made it a key tenet of his campaign as Tory candidate in Richmond that his £300 million wealth means he won’t be diddling voters for duck moats. “The amount of time MPs must spend working out how to exploit the system to fill their pockets, as opposed to getting on with the job, it must be a distraction,” he said loftily. But it is easier to run an organic farm when your money is free range.
What is revealing about Mr Goldsmith’s non-dom status is that he didn’t think it mattered. He told neither his constituency nor Mr Cameron. He e-mailed me indignantly to say that almost all the income from his father’s mighty trust streamed into Britain to be taxed at 40 per cent. He could have dodged it; instead he paid millions. So why, I asked, if you forsook the benefits, did you not cease to be a non-dom before you became a candidate? You must have known it would tarnish, perhaps indelibly, your political brand?
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“Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” he replied. “It wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.” His campaign website brims with testimonies that he is Richmond-bred, the local candidate. Yet his money is anything but — his tax status, like that of so many super-rich, is in a holding pattern, circling the world.
Perhaps, with their foreign homes and perpetual travel, the cocktail of parental nationalities, they do not understand why, to dreary earthbound folks, it matters that someone who proposes to stand on their hind legs and represent 60,000 fellow citizens should pay their full dues to their nation. I don’t think that Mr Goldsmith believes taxes are paid only by little people. But I suspect that he does believe that only little people would judge his politics on how he pays tax.
I was reminded of Mr Goldsmith watching Sting on Newsnight this week. Paxman flung everything you’d wanted to say to the lute-playing pseud who, with his country acres and elaborate domestic staffing, is very much the aristocrat manqu?.
How could Sting lecture us about global warming when he dragged his entourage of 750 around the planet? Why did he need seven homes? If he cared about this tract of rainforest about to be raped by a dam, why not simply use his vast wealth to buy it? Meanwhile, Sting, behind a bizarre Brian Blessed beard, looked at Paxo with bewilderment, even hurt. You expect me, his expression said, doer of great works on a godlike scale, to worry about your tiny earthling rules? Just like Bono, when asked about his energetic avoidance of tax.
Yet what chance does class war have in an era of wealth worship? How do you mobilise outrage about bankers’ bonuses after a decade spent aping celebrity excess? We are about to elect a Cabinet containing 18 millionaires, to give political power to the already immensely powerful, to draw our government from the narrowest social bandwidth. But to question whether their golden lives might prevent them understanding our lowly ones is frowned on as prejudice.
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Only sometimes do you see the fallacy of this view. A while ago I met at dinner a woman who had just been accepted on to the Tory party candidates’ list. Her voice was honeyed, her manners so exquisitely top-drawer, I could watch her all the live-long day. She lived in Notting Hill, weekended in Oxfordshire, was close to all things Cameroonian.
So why did she get into politics, I asked. I thought my question was neutral: it was perceived as hostile. She shrugged, told me that she’d voted Blair in ’97: “Now the parties are all the same,” she said. “We all agree on everything, don’t we? Who gets in now, it doesn’t really matter.” And I suppose to her it doesn’t. To those like her it never will.