“Always wealth.” The first test of fitness for government office according to Lord Salisbury, a to-the-manor-born, election-winning Conservative leader, who had the good fortune to rule at a time when class interests could still be pursued without embarrassment. But the sense created by the Panama Papers, and the subsequent row about the prime minister’s family and tax, is that power and wealth have, once again, quietly settled into a very snug fit.

After days of grudging, incremental disclosures, over the weekend David Cameron finally got round to doing what he’d first said he might do in 2012, and published his tax return details. There are a few remaining questions regarding the first family which MPs will wish to pursue as parliament reassembles this week, in particular whether the two £100,000 gifts the prime minister received from his mother were the product of offshore investments in Jersey, and indeed about who may gain in future from that indeterminate chunk of his late father’s fortune left in that tax haven. If these can be satisfactorily answered, he could fairly assert that intergenerational gifting is a routine way of reducing death duties among the propertied classes, and could legitimately protest, too, that he is not responsible for how his father made his money. But he may find that he remains tainted in the eyes of voters, both because of his dabbling in exotic offshore investments which are alien to taxpayers in Middle England, and because, for the best part of a week, he carried on like a man with something to hide.

Whether or not the scars on the prime minister heal, the bigger question for Britain is whether the secretive wealth of the elite is warping public policy. The UK may not be blighted with the sort of plundering governance that the Panama Papers documented elsewhere, but outright corruption of leaders is not required for politics to end up compromised. Some Tory donors in the papers ended up in the House of Lords. Mr Cameron’s own letter to the EU, which resurfaced last week, but which was written in 2013, after he had made play with tax avoidance as a political issue, obliquely but very definitely intervened to urge Brussels to go easy on imposing transparency on trusts. Today we reveal that the Revenue official whom the PM has now asked to review the whole tax-dodging question was previously a partner at a law firm that gave advice to offshore investors, including Ian Cameron’s Blairmore fund.

It all creates an unsavoury taste of self-serving clubbiness at the top of a society in which inequality has run out of control. The offshore antics organised by Mossack Fonseca are merely the most grotesque excesses of an economy where all the rules are written to give to those who have. Consider housing. Many of the shell companies in the Panama Papers existed for wealthy foreigners to buy London property on the quiet, part of a market which also creates many other winners who are not doing anything untoward. The prime minister’s tax return details, for example, have revealed that the Camerons receive three and a half times the median full-time wage in rent, the vast reward these days simply for owning a west London home. Nobody with an empty house is going to turn this income down. The danger, however, is that the interests of the housing market’s many losers drop out of view.

On Monday, the House of Lords will debate a government housing bill, which doubles up on the way British housing has been organised over the last generation, with such disastrous results for the poor. Social housing will wither again, with an extension of right-to-buy, inadequately financed through the forced sale of costly council properties, on criteria which would catch 97% of homes in the Kensington and Chelsea borough of Mr Cameron’s home. At the same time, “pay to stay” rules will ghettoise estates by driving working tenants out, and resources will shift from affordable homes for rent to “starter homes” for purchase, which will be unaffordable for many. Housing lists will lengthen again, but as subsidies shift further from council housing towards home purchases and private rent, the property bubble will get another puff. More good news for those who already own. The suspicion here is not corruption, but the veiled pursuit of the interests of one class against another. The agenda is one of which Lord Salisbury would be proud.