TOM UTLEY: The £80,000 jewel-encrusted handbag that brought out my inner Bolshevik 

By the end of an ITV documentary this week, I was almost ready to send off £3 to Labour HQ and throw in my lot with Jeremy Corbyn.

But then, Inside Asprey: Luxury By Royal Appointment might have been deliberately planned to bring out the Bolshevik in even the crustiest, most conservative-minded retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells.

This was a programme first aired last year — but repeated now, perhaps with Christmas gift ideas in mind — showing life behind the scenes at the upmarket jeweller, which has been catering for royalty and the mega-rich since it moved to its present premises in London’s New Bond Street in 1847.

By the end of documentary Inside Asprey: Luxury By Royal Appointment this week, I was almost ready to send off £3 to Labour HQ and throw in my lot with Jeremy Corbyn, writes TOM UTLEY (pictured: Asprey on New Bond Street)

In the show, we were treated to a glimpse of a cross-section of society: from the caretaker mending the seat in the staff lavatory (a silversmith himself before the company reduced its workforce) to the skilled craftsman in the attic, the middle-class female jewellery designer and the immaculately turned-out shop attendants, fawning on their disgustingly rich customers.

Many of them foreign, from the Middle East, America and Asia, these plastic-flashing jet-setters didn’t bat an eyelid at splashing out many times more than the average industrial wage on fripperies such as jewel-encrusted handbags (up to £80,000 each) or a safe made of solid silver in the shape of a gorilla, priced at a more modest £55,000. (Samuel L. Jackson, the Hollywood star, just had to have one.)

Disturbing

Or how about a £2.4 million diamond ring as an impulse buy for a woman who’d come looking for a handbag (to be fair, she said she’d have to go away and think about it, but she gave the strong impression she’d be back after a simpering word with hubby)?

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that the rarefied world of Asprey represents a microcosm of the modern economy. But in drawing such stark attention to the unbridgeable distance between those at the very top of the money tree and those at the bottom, with dwindling numbers left in the middle, the programme offered at least some pointers to the way Western economies appear to be going.

A safe made of solid silver in the shape of a gorilla, priced at a more modest £55,000 in London's Asprey

Indeed, only this week, the highly-respected Pew Research Centre found that America’s enormous middle-class, the driving force of the mighty U.S. economy, has shrunk to less than 50 per cent of the adult population, compared with 61 per cent at the beginning of the Seventies.

Closer to home, remuneration for senior directors in Britain has risen to a blistering 130 times their average employees’ pay, up from 47 times in 1998 and just 13 times in 1980 — a fact that sits uncomfortably with the Tories’ oft-repeated claim that the gap between rich and poor has narrowed since they came to power.

With this polarisation of wealth, meanwhile, comes another disturbing trend.

True, Britain has always been a class-ridden society, and in 20 years of writing about family matters, I’ve grown used to readers’ gentle ribbing over my middle-class outlook on life. In particular, I’ve known to expect letters mocking me when I’ve mentioned my own expensive education (Westminster and Cambridge, since you didn’t ask), and my accounts of my struggle to send two of our four sons to private schools before the money ran out.

But in recent years, mockery and the odd sneer — with or without a hint of envy — have given way to something akin to visceral hatred.

I get letters and emails dripping with poison, from an admittedly small but growing minority of my correspondents, viciously attacking me not so much for my views as for my background and my comfortable middle-class salary.

Of course, this must have a lot to do with the growth of the internet, which seems to have planted the idea among many that the only language anyone understands is the death-threat and the four-letter word.

But I reckon there is more to it than that. For in the past, comfortable lives for our families was almost universally seen as something to aspire to — while for those of us like me, without inherited wealth, achieving a decent income was considered a just source of pride.

In the show, we were treated to a glimpse of a cross-section of society: from the caretaker mending the seat in the staff lavatory to the immaculately turned-out shop attendants, fawning on their disgustingly rich customers

Bewildering

These days, there seems to be a fast-growing perception that the higher one’s tax bracket, the more profoundly ashamed one should be. While the more affluent middle-classes — among whom, after decades spent climbing out of the red, I must now include myself — are no better than filth.

For a long time, I found this not only hurtful (don’t worry, I always got over it on pay day), but also bewildering. After all, the better off we are, the more we contribute to welfare, public services and the general wellbeing of the nation, as the trickle-down effect of our spending puts food on others’ tables.

It’s only when I watch a programme such as Inside Asprey that I properly understand how so many feel. As it happens, the sleeping Corbynista in me was awoken a few days earlier, when I was leafing through the Harrods Christmas gifts guide, which somebody had left on the table in the pub.

On the show we saw a £2.4 million diamond ring bought on impulse by a woman who’d come for a handbag

In it, there were frocks for five-year-olds priced at £355 each and a backgammon set at £3,400. Wasn’t there something just a little bit obscene, I mused, about the thought of spending quite so much on quite so little, when there are people in this world who are starving?

Then came Inside Asprey, and I began to feel . . . if not hatred or envy (I’m not the hating or envying kind) . . . at least deep contempt for these customers who blithely shelled out tens of thousands of pounds for such trinkets as novelty owl and pussycat salt and pepper mills.

Then there was the father buying bling for his daughter’s 21st (£15,000, if I remember rightly — and he didn’t so much as gulp when he was told the price).

Most excruciating of all was the oleaginous crawling of the shop assistants (‘we only show these to our favourite customers, madam’), with the lowest point coming when an unnamed Saudi princess sent word that she wanted the shop kept open late for a private viewing.

Corrupt

It’s a terrifying thought, but if even I have moments of Bolshevism, we can’t write off LAbour leader Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) just yet

‘Remember, you’re dealing with royalty,’ the boss told his underlings, oozing with reverence. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘remember she’s a spoilt-rotten Saudi who’s got rich on corruption and oppression.’

Still, the oily treatment obviously worked since the silly woman coughed up for a dozen ugly handbags (average price, £33,000 each).

It was as I was seething over these unedifying scenes that it suddenly struck me why so many of my fellow countrymen are coming to regard the affluent middle-classes in the same way I see that princess.

With their mammoth bonuses, corrupt bankers must be partly to blame for severing the mental connection between honest effort and reward, and thereby spreading the idea that anyone who is comfortably off doesn’t deserve it.

But as the electronic age shrinks the middle-class and enriches those at the top, while mass immigration depresses wages at the bottom, it’s also increasingly true that the living standards I enjoy seem as unattainable to millions as those of Asprey’s customers appear to me.

When I was starting out, a rookie teacher, junior doctor, trainee manager or humble hack could realistically aspire to owning a house in London and a car, and taking regular family holidays abroad.

To the likes of my sons — two teachers, a bar manager and a perpetual job-hunter — such luxuries of middle-class life seem as impossibly distant as the prospect of breezing into Asprey’s to spend millions on a piece of jewellery.

Now, I won’t pretend I know the answer — though, as sanity returns, I’m absolutely sure the Labour leader doesn’t have it. But I’m equally certain that until someone finds it — making a middle-class way of life accessible once again to the masses — the extremes of Right and Left will flourish throughout the West.

It’s a terrifying thought, but if even I have moments of Bolshevism, we can’t write off Jeremy Corbyn just yet.