fieldus

Even a Bullingdon baronet can struggle in the rarefied air above democracy

Much has been made of Rothschild’s private nature, and he seems to have an instinctive grasp of how to turn any weaker personality traits - perhaps even catagelophobia, the fear of being ridiculed - to his advantage, cultivating an air of quiet steel, rather in the way that Charles Saatchi or Kate Moss have long traded on the intriguing power of saying nothing at all.

Osborne has betrayed himself as the opposite - a blabbermouth who picked a fight with Mandelson on ground on which he was so compromised that a regional sales rep whose Vauxhall Astra glovebox contains a copy of The Art of War could tell you that defeat was inevitable. Even more staggering, for a chap who has known Rothschild since they were at prep school, was Osborne’s inability to realise that leaking details of conversations that took place while he was enjoying Rothschild’s hospitality would incense his host.

Corfugate is primarily a tale of club rules broken. Not literal clubs, in most cases - though Bilderberg Group meetings have been mentioned - but the deck-shoed networks of the super-powerful, who sweetly allow politicians the illusion of being allowed to run things, and even to start the odd war, so long as they think it will bring down the price of oil. Most of the politicians ever allowed within a sniff of this world learn its mores, just as Mandelson has. They are pathetically grateful to be asked to Rupert Murdoch’s annual retreats; they allow Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud to buy them £34,000-worth of private jet travel, as Cameron did on this same Greek trip; and they don’t do anything so vulgar as to mention in the register of members’ interests that they had a meeting with Mr Murdoch while they were there.

This is nothing new. John Campbell’s brilliant biography of Margaret Thatcher chronicles forensically the manner in which Thatcher treated Murdoch as a powerful Reagan-like friend and ally, given free access to her, and invited several times to spend Christmas at Chequers. And yet, she never once mentioned Murdoch in her memoirs.

Whatever goes on in the rarefied air above democracy will always be politicians’ dirty little secret. If it wasn’t such a dirty big one, that is. The only mystery is why we seem to restrict use of the word oligarch to Russians. Oleg Deripaska, the man Osborne allegedly solicitied for a donation, is described thusly, though not Mr Murdoch, or indeed Mr Freud. Let us end this reticence. What greater credit to our meritocracy, after all, than an erstwhile popstar press officer’s rise to princemaker?