The rich hire in David Cameron just as they would a golf pro, a call-girl or an architect

Do the businessmen who’ve paid £250,000 to spend a bit of time with the current Tory leader seriously imagine they’ll get anything in return? After all, millions of British Conservatives donated their votes to this blister at the last election, on the understanding that they’d get a few right-wing policies in return. Instead, they’ve been treated like dim-witted college servants whose role is to clean up the vomit and dispose of the empty Green Chartreuse bottles after the big party before getting the quails eggs and Krug brunch ready for the Young Master and his unfeasibly rich chums.

It’s enough to make one to send for a copy of The Communist Manifesto just to check whether Marx and Engels might have been on to something after all.

Let me be honest – if Cameron and Osborne had done anything about paying back this country’s grotesque debts, or had used the tax system to support heterosexual married couples with children, or had taken a blow-torch to red tape and the quangocracy, or had told Fritz and Jean-Jacques to go boil their heads, I’d probably be taking the Tory Clubman view of this whole sleazy episode – Labour relies on union funds to keep them going, the Tories rely on businessmen. So what?

Oh, the hell with it - I do take the Tory Clubman view of all this nonsense!

Why? Well, first, I’m buggered if I want my taxes spent obviating the need for politicians to suck up to their paymasters when the current political system doesn’t seem to oblige them to suck up to core voters. After all, the price of political power should be that you have to suck up somebody (as well as Barack Obama, of course).

Second, I rather enjoy the thought of top politicians having to endure fantastically tedious get-togethers where they're forced to be jolly nice to people whom they no doubt rather despise. Imagine, one day you’re thousands of miles away with your tongue firmly inserted up the sphincter of the World’s Most Powerful Man – the next, you’re sitting next to some glamourless business bore droning on about corporation tax, enterprise zones and employment law. And his wife! After all, these aren’t Evelyn Waugh-style college bacchanals: these are the sorts of events where you’re probably tempted to stick a fork in your leg in order to help stay awake, and where you can’t even get drunk in order to quell the feelings of guilt that arise from the fact that you have absolutely no intention of doing any of the things these people are asking you to do. (Unless you were already planning to do them in any case.)

As for the rich folk who pay for the privilege of sitting in the glow cast by our modern-day Sun King, I repeat – why do they do it? I suspect the motive is staggeringly petty. Men who have everything can’t buy sporting or sexual prowess or good looks or wit or charm or taste – but they can hire people who’ll make them look and feel as if they do: the golf pro who’ll allow himself to lose the odd hole to their client; the call girls who’ll shriek in amazement at the size of their membrum virile; the dealers who’ll adorn their palaces with Old Masters or contemporary rubbish; the architects who’ll build those palaces for them (all with heated indoor swimming pools, gyms and paddocks); the sycophants who’ll weep with laughter at their leaden “jokes”.

Now that New Labour is no longer in power – and despite the current brouhaha in the media - men who have everything can’t buy political power. But by bunging some loose change into the Conservative Party’s coffers, they can hire in someone to make them feel as if they do actually possess serious political influence – and that someone just happens to be the Prime Minister.

I wish I could be more morally outraged by this arrangement – but it just strikes me as a bit pathetic, really.

What has genuinely outraged me is the fantastically incompetent manner in which the Tories have dealt with the furore. Who was the bright spark who came up with the idea to send Francis Maude out to calm things down? With his drawly, hoity-toity, patrician manner and his utter inability to read a situation, could start a fist-fight in a nunnery!