Show caption The estate of the sixth Duke of Westminster includes 300 acres of prime central London land in Mayfair and Belgravia including Grosvenor Square. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA Opinion Who the Duke of Westminster cares about … in descending order David Mitchell Of the duke’s approximately £9bn estate, approximately £0bn goes to the taxman, and approximately £0bn to his daughters Sun 14 Aug 2016 05.00 EDT Share on Facebook

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Let’s take the sanctity of human life as read and get down to brass tacks. Who matters most? To you, that is. Who are the important ones? If you say you feel everyone’s equal, you’re lying. That’s not feasible. There are seven billion and counting. To like/love/hate/be indifferent to them all to the same extent is impossible unless you’re a supercomputer. A supercomputer that can feel.

And while you’re at it, Empathbot-Maxilove, why do those currently alive have the monopoly on mattering? What about the dead? And the not yet born? If you’re factoring in the latter, your unavoidable implication is that those currently alive who are capable of reproduction count for marginally more than those who aren’t. That’s dangerous territory and shatters the egalitarian premise that got you into this mess.

It’s no good: some people count for more than others – that’s clear. You only have to watch the news. “Thousands killed, a Briton grazed – we’ll bring you live pictures of the graze.” We all care about the people around us, and the people not around us, to wildly varying extents. The only hope for equality is in everyone being someone’s priority. Which they’re not, which is awful. Our route into caring about people we don’t know is via imagining how we’d feel if their problems were afflicting those we do.

A lot of people don’t like inheritance tax. It feels like stealing from the dead

People we know are more important to us than people we don’t. And the better we know them, the more important they are. There’s a word for this. Friends! That’s it. And family, of course. Family, friends, friends of the family, family of friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, acquaintances of friends, someone you met once, someone a friend met once, someone an acquaintance met once, the rest of humanity. That’s the rough order of priorities, for most of us.

Where in that list would you place someone not yet born whom you will never meet, and indeed no one you will ever meet will ever meet? In fact, no one you will ever meet will ever meet anyone who will ever meet them. How high up does that person come? This is not about the environment, by the way. I’m not talking about billions of people you will never meet; almost anyone would say they’d matter more than one person you know. I’m not referring to “our children’s children”. I mean your child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child. If it’s a boy. And then his child. If it’s a boy. How high up your Christmas list are those chaps?

If your answer is “not very”, this is one way in which you differ from the late Gerald Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster. For the sixth duke, and most of his predecessors, it’s absolutely all about those little guys. This strange fact struck me last week amid all the chatter about the unjust ramifications of the duke’s sudden death.

In case you missed them, here are those unjust ramifications again.

1) Of the late duke’s approximately £9bn, approximately £0bn goes to the taxman. I’m sure the Treasury gets some money, but nowhere near a billion quid, let alone the £3.6bn that would be owing if the estate were liable for the standard 40% inheritance tax rate. But it isn’t, obviously, for reasons that are as literally legal as they are figuratively criminal.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

2) Of the late duke’s approximately £9bn, approximately £0bn goes to his three daughters.

3) Of the late duke’s approximately £9bn, approximately £9bn, and the titles of Duke of Westminster, Marquess of Westminster and Viscount Belgrave, go to his third child and only son, Hugh (25).

A lot of people don’t like inheritance tax. It feels like stealing from the dead. It isn’t, but it feels like it. The reasoning goes: I worked hard for my money, I paid tax on it when I earned it (not all of the above quite applies to the late duke), so why shouldn’t I be able to leave it all to my children? Why should the taxman get any?

The answer is that, in order to pay for public services, the government should take money out of the economy where it’ll be least missed, where its absence is least likely to plunge people into poverty or reduce consumer spending. The money of the dead is therefore ripe for taxation: the owner no longer needs it, and his or her heirs have been doing OK without it up to now. Inheritance tax doesn’t discourage earning, it discourages dying, which I think we can all get behind.

But I understand why many people balk at that tax. I find it harder to understand where the late duke is concerned. What if £3.6bn were paid in tax? That would still leave unimaginable wealth for the next generation. Even at the same rate of tax, their children would also be stratospherically well off. The financial wellbeing of his family would be assured as far into the future as he could meaningfully look. Meanwhile, his country would benefit from a significant windfall that would help millions today. That’s just not the same as bereaved kids having to sell the house they grew up in to meet a tax demand.

The late duke doesn’t strike me as greedy. “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up. I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me,” he once said. And I believe him. This was not a Philip Green figure, cavorting on a yacht. He was a quiet man, obsessed with the Territorial Army and duty. But what duty? A duty to humanity, a duty to those he loved? No, a duty to the longevity of the Grosvenor family’s prominence.

So he denied both his country and his daughters significant portions of his wealth, just to keep it all together, to increase its chances of lasting, like one big ice cube instead of several smaller ones – to maximise the length of time for which people of his name will still be rich, even though they are as distant strangers to him as his ancestor, the original “Gros Veneur” (fat huntsman), who came over with William the Conqueror.