According to his tax return, revealed yesterday (to show he was paying tax), Rishi Sunak earned £2.2 million last year. ‘Earned’? That seems an odd word to use, for an income coming mainly from investments; and taxed at a lower rate than most of us Brits have to pay. Rishi is probably the richest prime minister Britain has ever had, with an even richer wife, apparently, and an immensely privileged background (Winchester College); now ruling over a country where the average person’s income is £28,000 – nowhere near enough, of course, to pay for a Public School education.

Keir Starmer alluded to this indirectly (if somewhat waspishly) the other day in Parliament, only for his intervention to be characterised by Sunak as embodying the ‘politics of envy’. Now, I don’t know about anyone else; but for my part I’m not at all ‘envious’ of his wealth, getting along as I do quite comfortably on a pension of about £25,000 a year – all really ‘earned’ – and not wanting anything more that an extra £2 millions-odd would buy for me. (Of course, if I still had children with me I might need a little more.) I’m just concerned that this £2 millions a year is going to him, rather than to society as a whole. Perhaps some of it is, in the form of charity. But still the disparity seems grotesque. And even dangerous, in Sunak’s present job: putting him in a situation where he can’t possibly empathise with the people he’s meant to be leading. That’s apparent from almost every word he speaks.

Maybe we need more of the ‘politics of envy’ to counter this. And even a law disqualifying the ultra-rich from public office. (You can put your own upper limit to it.) Perhaps America could do with the same. But then there might be no Presidential candidates left.