The UK Office for National Statistics publishes my favourite one. This measures inflation using a basket of goods in common use – a category that is constantly shifting, and at the moment includes mobile phone downloads, sparkling wine and long-sleeved cotton shirts.....

...The super-rich index is made up of items that are, let's say, different. A Russian sable coat at $240,000, a facelift for $18,500, a thoroughbred yearling racehorse at $319,340, a Sikorsky helicopter at $14.8m, an arrangement of flowers changed weekly for six rooms at $98,100 or a year's tuition at Harvard at $56,652. It is, in a dark way, hilarious that a Harvard education counts as a luxury good. If all that starts getting too much, you can always decompress with a week at the Golden Door Spa in California, $6,750, or 45 minutes with an Upper East side shrink for $325....


....To be in the 1%, in income terms, you have to earn – or, as the Socialist Worker has it, "earn" – £150,000 a year. That's a lot, to most people's way of thinking – but not to the way of thinking of the rich. I've asked quite a few people in the world of money, the kind of people who know properly seriously rich people, what counts are being properly, seriously rich. The consensus figure is that you need $100m. At that level, even the seriously rich agree that you are rich...

The capital of the UK has one of the world's largest concentrations of the super-rich, and the reason for that is that we have chosen to have them here, as a matter of deliberate government policy. The relevant policy is the notorious provision in relation to "domicile", as a definition of an individual's tax status. Every other civilised country in the world taxes its inhabitants on their income and capital: the basic rule is that if you live in a place, you pay its taxes. But it's different in the UK. Here, if you come from overseas, and can prove strong links with overseas, and can prove that you are going to return to overseas, and can therefore establish a "domicile" overseas that is different from your "residency" in the UK – well, in that case, you are treated entirely differently for tax purposes. You pay tax on your income in the UK, like the rest of us; and you can remit capital to the UK; but your overseas income, as long as you keep it overseas, is out of the reach of the Inland Revenue.

What this policy amounts to, in practice, is that the UK has a gigantic sign hanging over it saying, "Rich People! Come and Live Here! You Won't Have to Pay Any Tax!" It is an extraordinary policy for any developed nation, and not one that anyone else has been tempted to adopt. Other countries have low tax rates to attract businesses – in the EU, Ireland and the Netherlands stand out – but the only countries that have anything even vaguely resembling the British policy towards the super-rich are places that are openly accepted as tax havens, such as Monaco and Switzerland.

I had to smile...

“The only time that I use the state,” one financier worth an estimated £500 million confided in me recently, “is when my driver drives on public roads from the City to my country estate. I don’t like it, but I can’t help it.”

I feel for him...