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London has always welcomed immigrants with dreams of prosperity. You only have to walk around Knightsbridge or the marinas of Chelsea to see the impact the latest wave has had — and as the US prepares to raise taxes for the super-rich, our bankers may soon be wealthier than their New York counterparts.

“Oh, London is a wonderful city for plutocrats, one of their favourites!” says Chrystia Freeland, the author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich, an absorbing study of the world’s wealthiest people. “One of them, a European actually, said to me once: ‘London is such a great city: the British will sell you anything’. I was listening to Boris Johnson give one of his ‘rah-rah’ speeches at the CBI recently, and it made me think of that remark.”

By anything, what did he mean? Railways? Palaces? Schools? “Exactly. All that stuff! He saw nothing wrong with that at all.”

Neither, apparently, should we. “The irony of life in this plutocracy — which all of us inhabit — is that we have come to rely on our plutocrats. It’s better to have them around than not — but you need to be aware that having them around doesn’t mean your middle class grows prosperous.”

Even if she rebuffs certain criticisms of the super-rich, Freeland issues urgent warnings about the system that has created this “0.1 per cent”, as she terms the plutocrat class.

Taking rising income inequality as a starting point, her book focuses on the men (all men) who have taken an ever larger proportion of the world’s resources for themselves: Russian oligarchs, the Silicon Valley billionaires and even the Mexican tele- communications tycoon Carlos Slim, who she calculates is the richest man ever to have lived, with a fortune of $53 billion.

Freeland is familiar with these circles. A petite mother-of-three, she is currently the Global editor-at-large of Reuters. She was a business reporter in Russia for much of the 1990s and later worked for the Financial Times in New York.

We meet at the Savoy, where she is happy to order champagne in the middle of the afternoon — though she knows her limits. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian billionaire, once remarked to her that “if a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. We all had the same chances — some of us did it and some of us didn’t”.

“I sometimes wonder how the super-rich feel about the male journalists who talk to them,” she says, “because in their heart of hearts, a lot of them feel that if you’re not a plutocrat, you’re not as good a person. I don’t think they consider women to be eligible to be plutocrats. We’re not in the game, so we’re not lesser humans.”

So what sets these greater humans apart? By and large, according to Freeland, they are “self-made”. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were born poor (Mitt Romney and Rupert Murdoch both used the affluence they were born into as a springboard to greater wealth). However, most were born outside the traditional elites. “That helps, because if you’re on the inside, you aren’t going to spot the shifting of the tectonic plates that might enable you to make a fortune,” says Freeland.

Two major shifts in particular have created the plutocrat class: globalisation and the technology revolution. While for the middle class, globalisation means more competition for jobs, for those at the top it means a bigger marketplace. And while new technology means workers being replaced by computers, for the plutocrat it means more efficient systems.

Still, to spot these opportunities you need a specific mindset. “You have to be really numerate to become a plutocrat,” says Freeland, “in technology and finance, obviously but also emerging markets. The stereotype of the Russian oligarch is that they are surrounded by supermodels and gun-toting bodyguards, but you’ll find that the guy himself often has a PhD.” And they believe they deserve their rewards: “They see their wealth as divinely ordained. These particular skills they have make them feel they are Supermen.”

Unlike previous elites, this is a class of hard workers. “They’re not struggling to join a leisured class. They don’t have that much interest in leisure — they want to do things and make an impact.” She cites the Bill Gates Foundation and Arki Busson’s education projects. “While we non-plutocrats find the idea of conspicuous consumption so appealing, the new status symbol is intellect. It’s about being as creative and having as much impact in the public and civic spheres as you did in the business world.”

According to Freeland, “today’s plutocrats attach the most value to people who made it themselves. The point is that you had what it takes to make that fortune. They recognise and admire that trait in one another, regardless of nationality — and even regardless of politics.”

It is an instinct they want to hone in their children, too. “Because they are alpha-geeks, they believe strongly that you must be geekish to succeed. So just as they don’t aspire to a life of leisure, what they want for their kids is not for them to have fine manners or an appreciation of art — but for them to get into Harvard or MIT. It’s not for the social cachet, it’s really the idea of excellent intellectual preparation.”

Still, another less appealing trait is their self-pity. If one thing unites global billionaires it is the notion that they are uniquely persecuted. There’s some truth in this in China, where 14 yuan billionaires have been executed in the past 10 years, and in Russia — Mikail Khodorkovsky currently languishes in his ninth year in jail. In the West, it seems harder to fathom.

Freeland cites an email from the hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, entitled Battered Wives, in which he encouraged his fellow multimillionaires to see themselves as the victims of domestic abuse, and President Obama as an aggressive husband.

“For your average white hedge fund multi-billionaire in New York, life doesn’t really get any better,” says Freeland, “yet they are comparing themselves to a physically abused wife. It’s hard to imagine a weaker person in our society.”

The best explanation that Freeland has encountered for all this weepy-woo came from a Seattle plutocrat called Nick Hanauer. “He pointed out that since the Reagan era, to be rich has been the equivalent of being virtuous. The process of getting rich has been your contribution to society. Now that’s tremendously appealing, because people don’t just want to be rich — they want to be good.”

It is only since the crash of 2008 that people have started to challenge that narrative. Indeed, the US election was in some ways a referendum on the plutocrats, lost by the multi-millionaire Mitt Romney and his Ayn Rand-loving sidekick, Paul Ryan. “There were so many private jets that travelled to Logan airport in Boston for the expected Romney victory party that they had to send them to an overflow airplane parking lot,” says Freeland.

“Barack Obama was explicit about income inequality being an issue and about the rich having to pay a bigger share. Until recently that sort of discourse has been taboo in the US. The Republicans accused him of waging class war — but if there was a class war, the middle class won.”

Even if Freeland maintains that London is better off financially with its Qatari sheikhs and Uzbek business magnates, she warns that we are due a cultural reckoning.

“Apart from the United States, Britain has most eagerly embraced these ideas — and it’s a society where you have seen income inequality surge, much more so than the rest of Europe. In some ways the British experience of global plutocracy is much more extreme. America is mostly run by its own plutocrats but to have outsiders come in and exert influence on your country is much more of a cultural challenge.”

Still, we shouldn’t mistake this for a local phenomenon. Every country looks for its own reasons for rising income inequality, she says — here, we have fixated on George Osborne reducing the top rate of income tax or the fact that, say, David Cameron went to Eton. This is a global class and they have created a global problem.

“The really compelling thing is to pull back and see it’s happening all over the world. We as a society are experiencing huge economic changes that are mostly benign — who is really opposed to the technology revolution or to globalisation? These should be positive things but the results have not been positive. That is the reality. And that’s really scary.”

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich is published by Allen Lane, price £25.

The men who bought london

Lakshmi Mittal £12.7 billion

The wealthiest man in Britain since 2005, steel tycoon Mittal is now also one of the best connected, after an Olympics spent schmoozing with Boris Johnson and Seb Coe in the shadow of his £19 million ArcelorMittal Orbit. He lives with his wife Usha in Kensington Palace Gardens in a house bought from Bernie Ecclestone for £57 million in 2004.

Roman Abramovich £9.5 billion

He’s the oligarch who first put that word into our everyday lexicon and, as chairman of Chelsea Football Club, remains the most famous plutocrat on these isles. A trigger-happy record of firing successful managers is beginning to hurt his reputation among the British media, to whom he never speaks, but his love of London isn’t in question.

The Hinduja brothers £8.6 billion

Gopichand, 72, and Srichand, 76, come from a famous Indian business family, with interests in banking, defence, technology, motor manufacturing and energy. In 2006 the brothers bought a £66 million residence on Carlton House Terrace, right at the heart of Establishment London.

Leonard Blavatnik £7.5 billion

Another resident of Kensington Palace Gardens, Blavatnik paid £41 million for his home and outbid Abramovich in the process. In 2009 he bought the British arm of Mel Gibson’s film distribution business.

The Reuben brothers £7 billion

Previously industrialists in Russia and now Britain’s biggest property magnates, David, 73, and Simon, 70, own 10 British racecourses and Oxford airport. As the Standard revealed recently, they are also planning to transform Cambridge House, known as the In and Out Club, into Britain’s most expensive home.

Joshi Herrmann