It’s a networking event in one of the City’s great glass towers. The room is filled mostly with company directors, hedge funders, bankers and lawyers. Would they vote Labour? “An unmitigated disaster. You can’t be serious? Have you any idea what would happen? Half the clients of people in this room would be off, gone, anyone who can.”

The editor of Spears Wealth Management Magazine has kindly brought me with him to breathe in the thin air of the upper stratosphere. In the election I have travelled everywhere from Glasgow to the Isle of Wight, Bristol to Ely, Somerset to Gateshead, Chipping Norton to Wakefield, talking to people of all politics and none. But these are the invisibles, the echelons of money and power not seen on Newsnight or Question Time, who never apologise, never explain.

Their world is the beating heart of the modern Tory party, its financial backers, its influencers who whisper to David Cameron’s people in private gatherings, country suppers and the secret salons of Westminster restaurants; the world where Lord Chadlington, lobbying supremo, chats over the stone wall between his estate and Cameron’s in Witney. Murmuring what? We never know. Cameras pry into benefits street but none invade this private life of the nation.

I had forgotten that frank look of baffled incredulity. No one they meet votes Labour. “You mean just as we are repairing the frightful damage done by Labour, you want to put them back in? Good God!” “What, piss it all up the wall again? Pardon my French – but you want all those people back on welfare?” “I don’t think you realise what this government’s done to get the country back on its feet – and you want to give it back to the people who bankrupted us?”

The one non-Tory I met was an older banker from an ancient firm: “I’m a Christian. I’m appalled at migrants being left to drown in the Mediterranean.” Those nearby looked on him politely as an eccentric. A venture capitalist investing in start-ups shook his head: “The non-doms, they’ll go. Mansion tax, tax rates at 50%? Labour want to drive out wealth creators, don’t they?”

Would he go? Well no, but all the mobile global high net worths would be off like a flock of migratory birds. Look, the top London property market is already frozen, waiting for Thursday.

“You do realise,” said a woman on several boards, “it’s us middle classes who are the motor of the economy? Government has nothing if we don’t generate wealth for them to spend – spending it on people who create nothing.” (Middle class is a term of art, easier on the ear than plutocrat.) “Government wastes and wastes,” said a boardroom man. “Philanthropy does it so much better. Tax us less we’ll see that money well spent.”

We all live in our own silos – Guardian readers too. To understand the Cameron world, hear this drumbeat in their ears, their native noise. Forget the phoney “march of the makers”, the hard hats and hi-vis jackets of electioneering: when they leave politics, Tories return to this natural habitat.

English Conservatism’s rip-tide undercurrents break surface in the daily front-page vilification of Labour. The nation’s loudspeakers are an 85% rightwing press, owned by non-UK tax payers. Disappointingly, but no surprise, even the Financial Times with its City clientele calls for a Conservative win. Despite editorials regularly lambasting Cameron’s Euroscepticism, despite its chief commentator Martin Wolf’s devastating critiques of austerianism, it has reverted to its market. Its election editorial, “The compelling case for continuity”, is the authentic voice of unreasoning Conservatism, where being Tory is as natural as the English weather and Labour is always the interloping upsetter of apple carts.

As the papers loudly declare party allegiances, it won't just be one that wins it Read more

Yet Cameron has run the most radical government of our lifetime – cutting the state, sweeping away support for the weak, denuding local government, gifting millions to their folk to set up free schools, selling the NHS to private firms, privatising Royal Mail, tripling fees to make universities effectively private, replacing a million lost public jobs with pre-unionised lump labour.

All this state-stripping turmoil is disguised as sober “continuity” Conservatism. Broadcasters in their questioning too are swayed by this sense that Toryism is the norm and everything else insurgent. Just wait for a foghorn blast against an “illegitimate” Labour government if a Cameron coalition fails to collect enough Commons votes – though convention is with whoever has a Commons majority.

Labour’s aim is to restore the postwar, pre-Thatcher consensus – an adequate welfare state, more housebuilding, decent work and a robust NHS, taxing the rich more fairly. That makes economic as well as social sense: on the same page as that FT leader, Wolf points out how inequality has risen since the late 1970s, calling Cameron’s regressive taxes “worrying”.

The theme of the Davos world economic forum was the danger of growing inequality, while the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, says inequality is the greatest threat to growth. Yet, says the FT leader, “the fundamental weakness in Labour’s plans” is that “Mr Miliband is preoccupied with inequality”. He’s not alone.

When the chips are down, antagonism to taxing the rich comes before the future of Britain

Modest measures “restoring the 50p level for high earners and imposing an ill-conceived mansion tax” outweigh everything else – even the “seismic” danger of Cameron taking the UK out of the EU, putting the “integrity of the UK at stake”. Few have been more eloquent than FT writers about the need to stay in the EU. Yet when the chips are down, antagonism to taxing the rich comes before the future of Britain.

Greed, selfishness, unimpeded inheritance, privilege cemented down the generations, cutting benefits while giving more to the wealthy – those are the Conservative passions. The FT praises Cameron for having the “political courage” to “shrink the state”, but look how their How to Spend It magazine in this same election week suggests squandering all that wealth. Forget public services when you can spend £1,250 on a bottle of A Goodnight Kiss perfume or £10,100 on a tulle shirt dress. Has the £10,540 per person “ultimate Nepal” by helicopter, plus private audience with the king, been disrupted at all by the earthquake?

Try taking City denizens to food banks and nothing changes their mind. “Let them eat lentils, why don’t they retrain, where’s their get-up-and-go?” Most of us are entrenched. I could no more vote Tory than they could back Labour. I think them boorishly selfish, they think me delusionally ignorant of their “real world”. The country is profoundly split between a tribe of revolutionary state-breakers and preservers of the public realm. A hung result doesn’t make Britain undecided, but divided by a chasm between the reds and the blues.

• Polly Toynbee is a panellist at Guardian Live: Election results special on Friday 8 May at 6pm in Kings Place. For full details and to book tickets, see here