Politics: The cost of giving

David Cameron was in a foul mood on Monday night. ‘Cash for Cameron’, the scandal about a Tory treasurer trying to lure donors with the prospect of dinner in the Camerons’ Downing Street flat if they coughed up £250,000, is precisely the kind of story that gets under his skin. He knows that it matters, but hates the fact that it does. Part of him thinks that it is all beneath his prime-ministerial dignity.

It also irritates him that he is receiving little credit for being more transparent than any of his predecessors. He tetchily said to colleagues that evening that ‘if I am anymore transparent, I’ll be telling the press when I see my own family’. But, deep down, he realises the potency of any story about the Tories and a moneyed elite.

The Tories’ Achilles’ heel is that, according to a recent poll, two thirds of voters believe that they are the party of the rich.