"Top people take the Times"

You probably have to be near retirement age to remember when the Times used that slogan in its advertising. Back then the paper's view of just who the top people were would have included the Royal Family, the peerage and gentry, Oxbridge types and such. In the more egalitarian Age of Instant Celebrity in which we now live, the Times has shifted its sights. Its new obsession is money -- lots of it, preferably more than you know what to do with.

The Times has run a raft of pieces in the last few weeks designed to put the merely affluent firmly in their place. There was an article on "the Haves and Have yachts", which suggested that the latter might not come and visit you because they would assume your servants were not up to snuff; a soporific article on the very wealthy people who manage the money of the uber wealthy; advice from Lucia van der Post on what to get for the post-modern squillionaire (including what appeared to be a day trip to Venice for £8500 per head); and of course almost daily updates on the size of the City bonus pool. Even for someone like me who worked in the financial sector for many years, it's all been much too much, especially as almost none of it could be regarded as news or even as intelligent comment.

Interestingly, there are signs that some of the Times's columnists, always to the left of the Murdoch-driven editorial line, are feeling a bit queasy with it all. One of the more gossipy columnists noted that the grandees at one City bank had celebrated their latest windfall with a tastefully updated version of Saint Bob Geldof: "Do they know it's bonus time at all?". Mercifully, the columnist managed to report this in an appropriately scornful tone, noting that even some of those present had seemed discomfited by it.

Even the Sunday Times economics columnist, David Smith, sounded a more cautious note. He noted the proliferation of extravagant displays of Christmas lights this year -- which I'd say were one of God's ways of telling you that you have too much money, except that the kind of people who do such things are probably not very big on the religious aspects of Christmas anyway. Smith then made the surprising but doubtless true observation that within 100 yards of each such monument to waste, there was probably a pensioner turning down the gas fire in order to avoid excessive heating bills. Bravo Mr Smith!

I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is definitely better. But whereas the Times's former "top people" had some sense of their role in a wider society (and a term for it: noblesse oblige), many of today's wealth-defined elite seem more interested in pulling up the drawbridge. We're all poorer for that.