The spreading Ottawa scandals about senators Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy et al, budding into Nigel Wright’s $90,000 friendly gesture, and blossoming into what Stephen Harper knew — I have no idea why my metaphor is floral — have taken on a new sociological aspect.

Senate Government Leader Marjory LeBreton is bitter. She has been working so hard on open government — though she just closed the Duffy hearings to the public — but won’t get credit because she lives in a city “populated by Liberal elitists and their lickspittle media.”

This is startling. Attacks on the “elites,” imaginary or not, usually come from Angry Pyjamas in rural ridings, men who perceive themselves as short of power or money and resent those who have both. If there’s an elite in Ottawa, LeBreton personifies it. And yet she seethes.

During the Liberal debates, Martha Hall Findlay — a great candidate and a person I admire — berated Justin Trudeau for having had a rich father. “You keep referring to the middle class but you yourself have admitted you don’t belong to the middle class.” She apologized later — it’s not as though Trudeau lives large — but it struck me as odd because Hall Findlay is no slouch herself, a lawyer, businesswoman, a skier on the national team and so on.

If she was saying that money defines an elite, I think she misunderstands Canada. How can a Conservative, after all those years, all those pigs-at-the-trough appointments, not feel part of the “elite”?

The Conservatives generally still feel like rubes. Their MPs went to Bible colleges or no colleges. They’re from out west but not from Vancouver. They are socially hard-right — anti-abortion and pro-religion — which doesn’t play well in the rest of Canada. The fact that Ottawa Inc. throws money at them doesn’t ease their status anxiety.

In the U.S., the Eastern Seaboard noblesse oblige political class has died. But money, mountains of it, defines the Koch funders of the hardest-right and even the new Silicon Valley elite in a terrifying way.

Both the western and the eastern billionaires define elitism narrowly, while trumpeting their love of the common man. Political journalist George Packer has recently detailed how Silicon Valley billionaires are not “fight the power” anymore, if they ever were. They are anti-intellectual people of narrow interests who direct so-called philanthropy to causes that will build their already vast power.

Their sector used to hide its money in chinos and ironic T-shirts. Now their lifestyle is at hedge-fund level, they employ few women or minorities and no, they don’t pay much tax.

Witness Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on Apple’s withered tax payments, as low as 0.05 per cent in some subsidiaries. The senators slavered. “I love Apple. I love Apple!” trilled Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is, in real life, not stupid as she sounds. There’s so much Apple money in the room that it crowds out the oxygen.

Britain does have an elite. Thanks to LibDem support, Old Etonian David Cameron runs the nation as if there were actual fences — okay, moats and ha-ha’s— between the classes. His cabinet is filled with old Etonians.

The London Review of Books — a publication that worships intellect and rather abhors money-grubbing —commented Friday on an Eton scholarship exam from 2011 that has been released from captivity, coincident with Old Etonians like Education Secretary Michael Gove being under heavy fire for improving the national curriculum.

One exam question posits that in the year 2040, amid a gas shortage, 25 protesters have been shot by the Army. “You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain” why the killings were both “necessary and moral.”

In Canada, this question would be theoretical. In Britain, the Eton student might well become PM. This drives Guardian readers mad. There is an elite in Britain — “middle class” there means “upper-class” in Canada — and it is thriving. It’s not all about money either. It’s based on the unprickable self-confidence balloon of the student who went to excellent schools and thence to Oxbridge.

Oh, and the math question? It asks how many days’ labour “Peter” will have to pay for to have a large conservatory built onto his house.

So LeBreton has asked a fraught question. If Conservatives felt themselves to be members of this mystical “elite,” would their senators be less eager to claim for dodgy expenses? A confident elitist is always honest about expenses because that is what one does. A striver might well double-bill.

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It may be that the Conservatives are still strivers. Wallin is always going on about her hometown of Wadena but if you think about it, she’s really saying, “I am no longer from there.”

There may well be a Liberal elite from which the Conservatives are excluded. Thus they burn. My problem is that it is so amorphous as to be indefinable. The Conservative class resentments will forever salt the wound. It will not help them retain their majority in the next election.

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