The price of posh

Why being rich doesn’t always pay

It has always been hard work being posh, but now it is a more expensive affair, too. Or so we are told by Coutts, whose latest research shows that the prices of Glyndebourne tickets and Samsung Galaxy S8+ phones have been inexorably rising as sterling declines – a posh tax, if you will, in which increases in the prices of luxury goods are now dwarfing the rate of inflation.

“Since many luxury goods and services are in fundamentally short supply, their prices may not always move in line with the wider market,” explains their 2018 Luxury Price Index, which The Daily Telegraph has exclusively obtained. “People who consume such items can face a very different rate of inflation to the majority of the population. This can have a big impact on the real value of their wealth in the long run.”

A night at a junior suite in the Gstaad Palace hotel, they note, will now cost punters 3.4per cent more (compared to last month’s inflation rate of 2.4per cent) than this time last year; Charbonnel et Walker truffles, meanwhile, are up 19.8 per cent on 12 months ago.

The British have an unusual genius for snobbery, of making fine distinctions about status according to an individual’s possessions, tastes or behaviour. We chuckle about the complexities of the Byzantine social system, but we have them here: what scholars of the Eastern Roman Empire call the “Plebeian and Patrician Distinction”. These distinctions are still alive and well, if this (patrician) version of the Office of National Statisics’ annual survey of the cost of (plebeian) essentials is to be believed.

Coutts, for the avoidance of doubt, is well-known as “the Queen’s banker” and has a reputation for never bouncing cheques since to do so would be infra dignitatem and suggestive of very flawed master-servant relationships with its clients. In these turbulent times, however, Coutts itself is changing. Thirty years ago, to enter a branch of Coutts was to enter, like Harrods, a different world, one of privilege and grace. A greeter in a frock-coat called you “Sir”, a tonic to the insecure. Your “private banker”, not, note, a (plebeian) “manager” would serve sherry and take you to the races in his Jaguar.

Now, most of the wood-panelled branches have disappeared, even the one near posh-central Sloane Square. And the service culture has retreated into a world of robotised systems, centring around a “focus on client objectives and capital preservation” when before, your man in a frock-coat would simply have lent you some money. However, you do get a free cappuccino at the bank’s headquarters on The Strand.

There is anguish at Coutts that “inflation in luxury goods is still much higher than the average return on cash”. The bank cites the statistic that school fees at Harrow and bespoke suits at Kilgour are up 5.5per cent since last year, while fine wine is up 10per cent say, £1,200 for a bottle of Cheval Blanc 2010. Downward pressure has come only from falling airfares at low-cost carriers, although sitting at the front of the plane from New York to London is creeping through the price ionosphere into outer space.

Meanwhile, on the humbler Consumer Price Index, the plebeian’s basket of 142 representative products dictates a different level of expectation and loss. Camcorders, pork pies and full leg waxes are out, the March report revealed, while gym leggings, Gopro action cameras and gluten-free quiche are in. We love all of this because it either confirms or denies us the status we expect for ourselves. If I have an Aston, I am posh. But if I eat a pork pie, I am not even plebeian. Touchingly, quaint notions of gentility remain. And significantly, the public as a whole does not feel any violent resentment about the manners, possessions and affectations of the privileged.

In a 2010 survey, Yougov discovered that to be called “posh” was felt to be neither flattery nor an insult, just a matter-of-fact. However, 93per cent of those surveyed thought themselves no such thing. Not very many people, it seems, actually want to be “posh”. Meanwhile, Posh Spice was so-called because her dad had a second-hand Rolls-royce, which you could buy for less than the cost of a new Fiesta.

The cultural history of the word is as important as its etymology is unclear. “Posh” is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1914, where it is defined as “typical of the upper classes, snooty”. The idea that it’s an acronym for “Port out, starboard home”, the P&O line’s discriminating allocation of comfortable sun-free passages on the old trans-oceanic India route, is dismissed as baseless, if charming, folk etymology. Instead, “posh” probably derives from the Romany word for “money”, or possibly from the Urdu word for “welldressed”. So we have had diversity from the off.

Definitions of luxury, too, are not straightforward. Of course, there is a universal appetite for access to privileged experiences – but any fool can nowadays lead a busy, cluttered life with lots of stuff soon to be redundant. Time, quiet and space are the greatest luxuries because they are now so rare. This is why the really, really rich enjoy superyachts (at about $3million per metre), even if in their scintillating vulgarity they are the very opposite of posh. It is not because the really, really rich actually are frustrated mariners who enjoy sailing and singing shanties, but because in their superyacht, they have bought a world of their own with no restrictions on planning permission and no possibility of crass intrusions.

And in this milieu, art has its special place. Since there is so little of it, prices will always be in the ascent; people say we will soon see the billion-dollar work of art. It is surprising that Coutts has not included Jeff Koons in its index along with the cost of a Blohm & Voss superyacht with twin helipads.

If Yougov is to be believed, what makes you posh is not a Kilgour suit, as Coutts suggests, nor having children at Eton (something that money can very readily buy), but a title, a certain sort of accent, some proper books and owning a fourdoor Aga. And these are either priceless or cheap.

Or, as far as that Aga’s concerned, 5.7 per cent costlier than it was this time last year.

If I have an Aston, I am posh. But if I eat a pork pie, I am not even plebeian