People don’t want to be rich any more. It’s a world turned upside down. Genies are having to completely rethink their planning strategies in anticipation of an era of altruistic lamp-rubbers. Suddenly they’ve got to find a way to make wishing for world peace turn round and bite you on the arse.

“I’m thinking maybe an all-life destroying pestilence so that the ‘world peace’ is the silence that follows the death of every living thing,” a genie who refused to be named told me. “But I’m just talking off the top of my turban.”

“It’s actually a fez.”

“Sorry – I haven’t looked in a mirror for two millennia. Genies can’t see their own reflection.”

“That’s vampires.”

After that the interview turned a bit sour and he refused to be drawn on whether Donald Trump has got any wishes left. “It’s genie-client confidentiality. But I will say I’ve been reading a hell of a lot of books about golf.”

What I actually mean is that people don’t want to be called rich. They still want the trappings of wealth, I imagine. Big houses, big baths, big dinners, leg-room, gold, a willingness to use the sort of cash machine that charges you £1.50. Everyone wants all that. They just don’t want it to be known that they’re getting any of it, if indeed they are – or for the amount of it they’re getting to qualify them for that unfortunate section of society, the fortunate.

The rich are the bad guys – so, being called rich, whether or not you are, is to be called bad

This notion that there’s something unlucky about being called lucky occurred to me last week in the wake of John McDonnell’s controversial definition of the rich as those earning “above £70,000 to £80,000 a year”. A lot of people objected to that, and even more objected to those objections. The first group pointed out that £70k a year is far from unimaginable wealth, PIYLIL (particularly if you live in London). So, if your image of a rich person is someone in a gold hat lighting a cigar with a £50 note, then the adjective is unfairly applied to a demographic of dutiful mortgage-paying graduates who occasionally go to Carluccio’s.

These complainants’ detractors, pausing only to mime playing the world’s smallest violin, countered with the undeniable statistical fact that earning £70k puts you in the richest 6% of the British workforce, and the richest 0.09% of the global population. In this row, comparatives and superlatives are oddly less controversial than the terms from which they’re derived. Richest doesn’t necessarily mean rich any more than poorest means poor. Tony Blair must have been the poorest man at many plutocratic dinners he’s attended around the world, but that doesn’t mean he needs to argue over who ordered extra chips.

It’s easy to define who’s richer than whom, but at what point do you become actually rich? Are you rich if you’re richer than average? If so, the £70k bunch might qualify as “very rich”. Are you tall if you’re taller than average? Possibly. I reckon many who are only marginally taller than the mean would consent to the adjective tall (which is not to imply that mean people are short). But then a lot of us want to be tall, while we don’t seem to want to be considered rich.

Maybe it’s always been like that. Wealth generates hostility so there’s nothing to be gained from drawing attention to it. “Get it quietly,” as they say in poker. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. What happened to “greed is good”, to conspicuous consumption, to Labour grandees being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, to the whole Thatcherite dream of the promise of wealth driving ambition, invention and hard work, to Britain’s entrepreneurs being lured forward in slavering pursuit of commerce’s golden bra, and the whole of society benefiting from any consequent trickle down?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

I’m not saying I miss all that bombast, but there was something coherent about it. It was a bold rebuke to the Communist bloc, an explicit elevation of liberty over equality. In a free society, the idea goes, people must be able to improve their circumstances, they must be offered the potential reward of riches. Which unfortunately means you have to have rich and poor. But rich and poor beats poor and poor and, in a land of capitalist opportunity, at least the poor have hope.

In that world, there’s no shame in being called rich. Many would be proud of it and, as with tallness, lay claim to it when it’s only marginally justified. In the society Thatcher was supposed to have ushered in, “rich” and “successful” would be synonyms and the phrase “well deserved success” a tautology.

That’s why last week’s scuffle to pin on others, or tear off oneself, the label “rich” is interesting. It’s become a term of abuse, like “aristocrat” in the French Revolution. Far from assuming the rich deserve their wealth, we’re now assuming the contrary. The rich are the bad guys – so, being called rich, whether or not you are, is to be called bad. “Society’s all wrong and you’re why!” is what it means. This is unfair because it’s a generalisation. But that doesn’t make it an unfair generalisation.

I suspect very few people feel rich, either in the neutral sense of having lots of money, or the contemporary one of being a profiteer of injustice. All of us, except Bill Gates on the one hand and some poor sod whose name posterity will never record, and who’ll be dead by the time you read this, on the other, are aware of people richer and people poorer than we are. So, subjectively, we’re all the squeezed middle. And, in these unnerving times, even if you know you’re loaded, you probably still won’t feel particularly safe or lucky. Hardly any of us think we’re part of the problem, which is part of the problem.

For Thatcher’s divisive concept to work even on its own terms, it required Britain to continue to become more meritocratic. Not fairer necessarily – because there’s nothing inherently fair about the distribution of merit – but a country where success is based on what you do, not the circumstances you were born in. If you’re holding a rat race, the prize must go to the fastest rat.

No ideological alternative has really caught on enough to sweep aside Thatcher’s vision of Britain, but the fact that high earnings are now a source of social shame demonstrates how tawdry and discredited it has become. Let’s bear that in mind as our current prime minister exhorts us to vote for it again.