So the subtext is revealed. The real reason for inviting Peter Mandelson back into government was to get him to spill the beans on the Conservative leadership's connections with the elite and the super-rich.

If Lord Mandelson does nothing else for Labour ever again, then giving the press an excuse to publish that picture of George Osborne posing with the Bullingdon Club will be service enough.

I had forgotten that Mr Osborne was a member too. So familiar has the picture of David Cameron in Bullingdon pose become - that funny little jacket, the bow-tie, Boris Johnson somehow already dishevelled on the step below - it is easy to forget that the third most senior Tory in the country was also in the Oxford club for the elite. The picture of Osborne with Nathaniel Rothschild and friends is agony: look at the arrogance, the ghastly smug waistcoated born-to-rule insouciance of the lot of them. Labour could do worse than have that picture printed on its election posters.

This is not about class war. It was a big mistake for Labour to allow one of its trump cards - the far more prosaic life experiences of its senior figures and their consequent ability to understand the lives that ordinary people live - to be hijacked by those in the party who launched a crass and childish attack on “Tory toffs”. It doesn't matter if you are born rich and privileged - that isn't your fault; what matters is what you do with it. To wheel around Oxford in a super-rich drinking club, join Tory Central Office and marry the daughter of a member of the political or landed aristocracy doesn't suggest that you have been much exposed to the plight of the less advantaged, or that you cared much about them before political opportunity came knocking.

As one voter, a single mother, confronted Mr Cameron on Panorama recently: “Several members of your Cabinet are millionaires... What matters is, how can you understand (us)?”

With difficulty, is the answer, as Iain Duncan Smith has honestly admitted. Having embarked on an intensive study of poverty in Britain since departing the Tory party leadership, he discovered “levels of breakdown that even I had not possibly begun to conceive of”, as he put it in an interview with The Times two years ago. He set about educating the Shadow Cabinet, organising visits for them to impoverished inner-city areas, a sort of poverty tourism for Central Office. The sons of Eton and Oxford, of lords and baronets, signed up.

“Small community groups in the inner-city areas put them there for a week so that they can learn actually what life is really like in these areas,” Mr Duncan Smith said. “And it's fascinating, somebody said what do you want to achieve out of it? And I said I only want to achieve three words from them when they come back. If they say the three words to me, then I know we've succeeded; and they are ‘I never realised'. And they all have said ‘I never realised'.” I never realised. Well you wouldn't, would you, not if you had gone through life and politics never having met a poor person unless they were serving you with drinks? “Using the phrase social justice is very challenging to Conservatives,” IDS added, which I have always thought an astonishing admission.

Perhaps Lord Mandelson's forays into the world of the super-rich are his own fact-finding missions on behalf of the Labour Party. Mandelson is an aberration within Labour, as was Tony Blair: Labour people do not, on the whole, hobnob with the very rich. They feel uncomfortable with them.

Can you imagine Gordon Brown swanning around the Greek islands with a gang of multimillionaires on yachts? He would loathe it.

By their friends shall you know them. The last thing the Cameron Conservatives need is for voters to be reminded of their exclusive backgrounds through the imagery of yachts and billionaires and old allegiances from the Bullingdon Club. Nor, as Mr Osborne must now realise, are the super-rich just harmless playmates with nice holidays on offer.

The circle in which Lord Mandelson appears to have been moving these past few years is beyond politics: it is an amoral international elite for whom politics is at best one of the toys at their disposal, something to be played with for a while and then discarded when it gets dull. I have met some of these people on the fringes: their interest in anything political is barely skin-deep, it lasts as long as the tan acquired on the summer yacht. Only because Zac Goldsmith, their British figurehead, appears to take politics seriously is it even acceptable in this country to show a temporary interest in politics. Normally the political world (Lord Mandelson aside, for novelty value) would be considered a bit common.

I remember one summer one bored lady (they are all bored) from a fabulously wealthy family lecturing me about the need for mothers not to work but to stay at home with their children; she had spent some of her family money sponsoring a report confirming what she already believed and was about to publish it. This was her politics. She might have had a little more credibility were I not watching her two children being taken care of by her third nanny, employed for the holiday, her two other full-time nannies being given a couple of weeks off. A different world, you see. These people are beyond ridicule. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere near serious politics.

But they have been toying with the new Tories, temporarily fashionable and, in Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne, offering house guests wealthy in their own right and connected to the British aristocracy to boot. They do not care about them, or about the Conservative Party. They are not political like that. Now Mr Osborne appears to have broken the fundamental rule of this social circle: omertà. Never, ever talk to the press. And his old Bullingdon mate Nat Rothschild is making him pay for it.

“Perhaps in future it would be better if all involved accepted the age-old adage that private parties are just that,” Mr Rothschild wrote to The Times. Not in politics, they are not. And not when (as has been alleged and denied) you discuss breaking the rules banning foreign donations, and with a dubious Russian businessman at that. But of course, boring little things like rules do not apply to the super-rich elite. They look down on them, and on most of us. Caveat emptor, George.

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