Let the quality take care of the yeomanry So here, in the usual spirit of goodwill, is a bold suggestion for the pair of them. Whether or not the extra income nudges them into top-rate territory, so that they will benefit from the reduced 45 per cent top rate, Cameron and Osborne rent out their west London houses for an estimated £75,000 and £100,000 per annum respectively. This seems an anachronistically lavish benefit in kind, since it is their entitlement to taxpayer-funded residences that creates it. No one questions their need for Downing Street houses, Chequers or Dorneywood, to function in their posts. But nor can anyone doubt how the rental windfall must look to those who are funding it while being forced to make painful sacrifices themselves. This is my idea. Gentlemen, give the rental income away. Hypothecate every penny of net profit (after deducting mortgage interest, maintenance and the estate agent's fee) to charities of your choice. Don't do so quietly, cowed by the fear that this will only highlight your wealth; Labour would look cretinous and malicious by attacking you for being so generous. Be bold and ostentatious about it, in the American philanthropic fashion, pour encourager les autres. The PM has often wished aloud that bankers would voluntarily give more, putting their names to new hospital wings and so on, without a Fred‑the-shred of evidence that anyone is listening. So why not lead from the front, by giving the £30,000-£40,000 a year, or whatever, to a centre for deprived children in Glasgow (a city in which a Tory could not win a two-way dogfight against the Yorkshire Ripper, and all the more ringingly altruistic for that), a drug dependency unit, or a neo‑natal intensive care ward? The twin deficits that killed the Big Society in the womb were lack of definition and lack of example. If Mr Cameron had made an hour a week of voluntary work a prerequisite of Cabinet membership, and found the time from his frantic schedule to do so himself, it would have defined a stubbornly abstract idea and set a fine example. A public act of charity would do the same. Governments cannot change the mores of an age, but they can help to bring the unfashionable into vogue (as the Blairs did for avarice). In so far as it was about anything, wasn't the Big Society about asking the advantaged to take some of the strain off an ailing welfare state? Doing so themselves would be a political masterstroke, immediately replacing the sharply ironic flavour attached to "we're all in this together" with the credible twang of hard fact. It would also, dare one come over all soppy, be the noble thing to do. The British do not instinctively dislike patrician politicians. Far from it, we secretly love a bit of posh, only so long as the quality takes care of the yeomanry. What everybody hates is being subjected to standards of stoicism dramatically different from those to which their enforcers are prepared to subject themselves. Tiberius is an unlikely political role model, to put it charitably, in a Western democracy. But he never lost a battle, and he understood that the best way to put down a mutiny is by nipping it in the bud long before it comes into bloom.