Smug alert: I’m about to be ever so pleased with myself. As I write, I’m sitting in my four-storey Holland Park home. Not sure how much it’s worth: £3 million, maybe £4 million – who’s counting?

If I look out of the study window, I see the shaggy-haired offspring of W11 frolicking in the Whipsnade-sized private communal gardens. If I peer out of the large sash windows at the front, I can see the honey-coloured lovelies of Notting Hill, looking like extras in a Richard Curtis movie. Ah, the world has been sweet to me. By the way, do you hate me yet?

I confess, I’m a fraud. Any fool knows that the inhabitants of this swanky bit of town leave in August to cause Italy’s annual espresso-price bubble. It is true, though, that I’m housesitting here while my own home has its mildew nature reserve replaced with a bathroom. It’s also true that I’m suffering from property-related bipolar disorder. I veer between the ecstatic highs of thinking that I have in some profound spiritual way returned home to my rightful social station (quite literally Holland Park Tube; very naice); that I too could be a gilded focaccia-munching Hillbilly trustafarian.

But psyches are like investment: what goes up must come down. The highs are followed by socialist moments of boiling resentment and jealousy. Why, why, why don’t I have a trust fund? What a harsh world it is that allows such terrible inequality: why is it someone else living in the big house, not me! It has to be said, there are more lows than highs.

Yep, I’m eaten up by a desire to eat the rich. But I’m not alone. It’s open season on the super-rich. The private-equity buccaneers are smeared as asset-strippers rather than the saviours of failing businesses; we whine that foreign bankers and blingy Russian billionaires are pricing us out of the housing market (“They come here, take our directorships, take our mansions, take our trophy wives”, etc); City bonuses lead to a ritualised howl about fat cats; and a slew of poverty-lobby reports ask us to furrow our brows at the rise of inequality.

As social problems go, the “undeserving rich” is a nice one to have. But have you noticed how the “problem rich” are never us, and the people who deserve to have their pips squeaked are always wealthier than us? It couldn’t be that we underestimate how rich we are. These aren’t words you often hear, but there is fun to be had at the website of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (www. ifs.org.uk/wheredoyoufitin), where you can take a test to show where you stand in the chain of earning. Most of us dramatically underestimate how many poor schmucks are below us, how few rich bastards above.

So what have the super-rich ever done for us? First, let’s remember Sir Alan Sugar isn’t rich because Vicky Pollard is poor. Back in 1776, we were told (weren’t you listening?) by Adam Smith that there isn’t a fixed supply of wealth, that because someone gets richer it doesn’t follow that someone has to wear ragged trousers. As P. J. O’Rourke put it: “Wealth is not a pizza. If I have too many slices, you don’t have to eat the Domino’s box.”

So the rich don’t harm us – but they do drive up standards for all of us. Would we live in a world where we can own BlackBerries, sports cars and ten-foot wide TVs if it weren’t for rich people demanding the existence of these things? If there weren’t so many thoroughbred clotheshorses galloping around Chanel stores, would we be so well dressed? There is a trickle-down effect from haute couture to Primark. Without the rich, would we have teeth-whitening, high-performance engines, Botox, boob jobs, therapy, Thai holidays? These things aren’t to everyone’s taste, but many want them, and the rich were the ones to establish a market in them.

And let’s hear it for the idle rich living off their inheritances. Would tennis or golf have ever come into existence without them? You need a leisure class, with time on its hands, to perfect such games and then popularise them. The Grand National would be a sorry affair if the assorted rich couldn’t afford to keep their horses in straw. Would the modern museum have ever come into existence were it not for the obsessions of private collectors in the 18th century? How many art galleries, opera houses, city academies or football clubs depend on the vanity or philanthropy of the super-rich? How many artists and musicians have flourished thanks to the patronage of the wealthy?

Nobody likes paying taxes, so we prefer them to be spent on important things – schools, kidney dialysis machines, keeping Prezza in a grace-and-favour apartment and harassing smokers. Nobody won votes promising more opera. So we need the idle rich to add vim and colour to our lives. Who knows what new things will emerge from their ability to experiment and play around, free from the constraints of 9 to 5 wage slavery. Maybe among the legion of slacking trust-funders at film school is the next Spielberg. Maybe there is even a billionaire who can make a reality of Peter Mandelson’s millennium promise that the nonexistent sport of surfball would be the game of the 21st century. In our age of abundance, we still need the filthy rich to give us a clue about how to enjoy life and discover new luxuries for us to consume.

Perhaps you still want to eat the rich. But the Rowntree Trust wouldn’t be able to issue its worthy reports if Joseph Rowntree, the teeth-rotting industrialist, hadn’t established the trust in 1904 to cure the “great scourges of humanity” – “war, slavery, intemperance, the opium traffic, impurity and gambling”. Karl Marx wouldn’t have had the freedom to think were it not for the patronage of the fox-hunting, factory-owning Friedrich Engels. Which goes to show that the rich aren’t all perfect.

Is constipation too much to stomach?

What’s not to like about constipation? Or, to be more precise, what’s wrong with that nononsense word “constipation”? You may have seen the ad in which two women sing the praises of a well-known yoghurt because it stops their insides being bunged up. Except they don’t say that; the voice-over talks of the product easing “slower digestive transit”. Eh? Who talks like that? We don't call air fresheners “negative olfactory sensation inhibitors”, or shampoo “follicular degreasant agent”. Get a grip, Mr Danone: what’s wrong with calling a manual excavation implement a manual excavation implement?

Different in kindness

The other day on the train a homeless person addressed the carriage, pleading for money. I firmly shook my head. I never give because: 1) the money would be better spent on agencies that help the indigent, 2) I don’t want to abet someone’s slow suicide by drink or drugs, and 3) giving money to beggars encourages more people to drop out. Not giving money is cruel to be kind.

But one passenger – let’s call him Mr Nice Guy – asked to look at the beggar’s arms for needle marks. Seeing none, he gave him money and started talkingly to him in a matey, familiar fashion. “Grrr,” I seethed inwardly. It was the mixture of showing himself au fait with underclass drug habits but also being uncorrupted by cynicism that rankled with me. I’m convinced that Mr Nice Guy raised his voice so that people could hear how good he was. Yuck: surely it was an example of moral showboating?

Yes, Mr Nice Guy preened his ethical plumage – but does that matter if the end result is kindness? And was I peevish because of guilt that my hardline stance was simply a cop out from helping? I genuinely don’t know: what do you think?

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