It lacks the elegance of “greed is good”, but as a distillation of the spirit of the age, it’s right up there. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

So that’s what they meant by “vibe shift”. Though, as the Epstein files reveal daily, the top 0.01% were hardly primly biting their tongues before Trump’s win, at least not in private. Those with telephone-number fortunes and great power felt able to speak, and write, to each other about women in language so vicious, so filled with hate – women discussed as body parts, as “less than human”, in Gordon Brown’s apt phrase – that they didn’t need the encouragement of a “grab ’em by the pussy” president to cast off their inhibitions.

Still, as that unnamed banker made clear to the FT, women are not the only group the powerful and privileged have been itching to disparage. This week it was migrants who were the target, accused by the billionaire Monaco resident Sir Jim Ratcliffe of having “colonised” Britain.

He may have got his stats wrong – he was in quite a muddle about the size of the UK population – but he did usefully debunk one stubbornly persistent assumption. For a while, it was taken as read that anti-immigrant sentiment was a function of economic anxiety: indeed, that was the instant explanation offered for Trump’s victory in 2016. But Ratcliffe, whose fortune is estimated at £17bn, won’t be feeling too much angst in the economic department. That is truer still of Elon Musk, who is simultaneously the backer of anti-immigration parties across Europe and the world’s richest man.

Indeed, the........

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