The new “mansion tax” announced by Rachel Reeves in last week’s budget is estimated to affect around 165,000 property owners, and on current trends the British media is forecast to have interviewed every single one of them by the end of the year. How else to explain the chorus of squeals we’ve been exposed to from the impoverished victims of Esher and Pimlico, whose only crime was to own a house worth over £2m in an era of egregious wealth inequality?

We hear, for example, from Philippa in Kensington, who tells the Telegraph that the new council tax surcharge on her two small mews houses will “wipe me out”. We hear from Paul, who owns a £2.5m house in Cobham, who tells the same newspaper that the move has wreaked havoc with his retirement plans. We hear in the Times from a property investor called Mark in Wimbledon, whose £9.5m house has been on the market for over a year, and gripes that he has had “almost no viewings in the last five or six months”. The Sun, for its part, evokes the spectre of “grannies being forced to sell up”, and condemns the levy as “a back-door way to seize chunks of family homes when hard-working Brits pass away”.

Perhaps in a country ever more dramatically stratified by wealth, nobody ever truly believes themselves to be rich. On Nicky Campbell’s BBC Radio 5 Live show last week, we heard from eight separate people who thought the tax was a bad idea until, almost half an hour into the show, Campbell finally read out a text from someone who liked it. By which time we had already been treated to a long and lavish diatribe from Kirstie........

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