Janan Ganesh’s article in last weekend’s Financial Times [Paywall] completely nails the confusion us mere mortals have about elites. Perhaps it’s an itch that we knew there, but couldn’t explain.
Viz. Why are the likes of Blair and Mandleson so enamoured, so craving of the meaningless wealth of the super rich? And why, conversely, are the Musk’s, Branson’s and of course Epstein’s so desperate for social cache and real power? Ganesh enlightens on their symbiotic relationship in that making serious money is boring, or rather the people that make it are tedious beyond belief, because their focus, naturally, is laser-like on making (concocting?) that wealth, that having social power as well as this is beyond their ken.
And the reverse is also true. Mandelson, whilst ‘wealthy’ by any normal standard, craved the wealth-beyond-meaning of the Epsteins and wanted a piece of the action. It looks now as if he was prepared to betray the UK to get it. Of course, he could never have that scale of wealth, least of all because the likes of Epstein would never allow it, he would otherwise lose one of his main levers (the other appears to be blackmail).
As Ganesh points out, this makes Davos much more understandable: the super wealthly hoping that some of the social and/or influential cache of policiticans, actors and intellectuals will rub off on them, whilst in reverese, the policitians, actors and intellectuals hoped that some coin would rub off on them, in the form of freebies, ‘consulting’ and ‘cash payments’ (otherwise known as…).
This leads to what is Farage in this scheme? Farage has social media cache, such that some see him as more as Influencer than policitian. Even though his coffers and those of Reform are filled by the superwealthy, he’s shameless about how he will gift and shill for funds, whether it’s bullion, whiskey, or escruciating (at least for us) Cameo performances. But then, for a person who has never been meaningfully in charge of anything, the super-riches association with him is not about cache, it is simply cash-for-access. Farage has no charm, but it is looking more and more likely that he will have power.