I’m currently doing something I’ve never done – sitting in First Class having paid for the privilege. I have had a couple of upgrades before on flights (once to first, once to business), and remember one time sitting in first class without the right ticket in protest simply because the commuter train turned up with half the normal number of carriages and it was horribly overcrowded. I wasn’t alone.

Today I’m travelling from London to Durham, and the standard off-peak return is £105. £105! I could drive for half the price, which is just crazy. But the time I need to leave is before off-peak, and booking two single tickets was actually cheaper in first class than standard. I guess they must sell-out of ‘discounted’ seat allocations. Anyway, it’s a good place to get some work done.

In an old British tv show, ‘A Very British Coup’, a truly progressive prime minister was asked if he wanted to abolish ‘first class’. He said something to the effect that actually he wanted to abolish second class, because he thought everyone was first class. Didn’t the questioner?

Something to think about on election day. Wouldn’t a much more aggressive inheritence tax – rather than parties falling over themselves to make allowances – be a way of ridding the system of the in-built politics of privilege? It’s all very well Cameron saying it’s to do with the middle classes being able to hand over their homes to their children, instead of the state, but that seems a convenient way of disguising the real goal.