In our present circumstances, I find my earlier Titanic analogy does not do justice to the behaviour of the British elite. It is as if the managers of the White Star Line had decided that there was no need to impose restrictions on the first-class passengers. They should, and indeed must, suspend the ship's rules because attempts to control the wealthy were not only futile but dangerous and contrary to the long-term interest of everyone on the liner. While the captain and his officers devote their time to finding ever more ingenious ways to pad out their expenses, the first-class passengers tire of drinking champagne in the Café Parisien and take control of the bridge. They steer the Titanic into an iceberg and run for the lifeboats. As they head over the side, they shout to the plebs in steerage that it is their responsibility to save the ship from sinking.

It says much about the essential good nature of the English that there haven't been riots in the streets.

Bracknell is in Middle England, the most misunderstood corner of the country. Conservative writers bellow that taxes on the wealthy are an assault on its values and aspirations and merely show how little they understand of their readers. The English middle class is not wealthy by the standards of elite London. The basic £64,766 salary MPs complain about does not put them in the middle of the individual income league but in the top three per cent of earners. If an MP has a partner making £30,000 a year, the couple is also in the top three per cent of household incomes. Those placings come before you add in the generous pension arrangements and the expense claims for moat cleaning and wisteria pruning.

The true middle class lives today in households which take in £40-£50,000 not £90-£100,000. Union militancy pushed their predecessors to the Right in the 1980s. The militant demands of the wealthy on taxpayers' purses ought to be pushing them leftwards now, the more so because the blow from the bankers came from nowhere, taking Britain from boom to bust within months. The 1970s were a miserable decade, and the hardship of the three-day week, rising unemployment and deadlocked government had prepared the ground for Thatcherism. Our generation received no warnings except from a handful of rogue economists, who were ignored by everyone who mattered. Psychologically and financially, we were unprepared.

The shop managers in Bracknell's ugly town centre and the IT technicians at Waitrose's head office there give no indication, however, that the shock of the crash will push them into embracing socialism or any version of it. With MacKay going, it looks as though they will vote Conservative again at the next general election and keep Bracknell one of the safest Tory seats in the country. They are not alone. In June's European election, parties of the Right prospered everywhere. I need to be careful about lumping them together because Angela Merkel's and Nicolas Sarkozy's criticisms of unregulated markets put them well to the "Left" of Gordon Brown. Nevertheless, it remains striking that propitious circumstances are not producing a left-wing revival in Europe.