Iain Duncan Smith wants to make the Conservatives the 'party of the poor'. He might be on to something, says Andrew Gimson, who feels poorer than most of his peers

The moment I realised the Conservatives could once again be the party for me came earlier this week, when Iain Duncan Smith said he wanted to make them "the party for the poor".

Any successful political appeal must raise some flicker of recognition, and this certainly raised a flicker with me. For though I cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called poor, I do seem to find myself poorer than most of the people I got to know a quarter of a century ago at university.

This may be a misleading impression: like most people, I am probably more inclined to compare myself with those of my contemporaries who have achieved financial success than with those who struggle in more straitened circumstances.

Tony Blair made just such a skewed comparison when he said, in an interview before the last general election: "It's amazing how many of my friends, who I was at school and university with, ended up so rich. There's a mate of mine I ran into the other day - we used to run discos together and things; now, he's worth millions."

Mr Blair sounded excited by the idea of making millions; so excited that he forgot for a moment that he and his wife have already made far more than the generality of people in this country can ever expect to make. Like Mr Blair, I earn well above the average full-time national wage of about £23,000 a year, and never go hungry or cold, yet still I find I have slid further and further behind many of my contemporaries.

Some of these friends spend amounts of money on holidays and school fees which would be quite beyond me, and which I prefer not to think about. But the most noticeable thing they have acquired in the past few years, as they moved into their forties, is a house in the country with at least six bedrooms. And as my dear wife observes: "It's not just the house - they've got a huge trampoline in the garden, too."

Let me say at once that I can see no real objection to trampolines, or at least that I cannot understand why it is that I am in fact deeply prejudiced against them. Some vein of suppressed snobbery or puritanism stirs within me when I see a large trampoline. Yet my children have bounced happily for hours on end on various of these wonderful contraptions, and I have little doubt that they would prevail on me and my wife to buy one, too, were our back yard big enough.

As for the more traditional amenities such as croquet lawns, herbaceous borders, tennis courts and swimming pools that surround this kind of place in the country, on these I would not mind spending money, at least as long as it did not fall to me to fish the leaves out of the pool.

But an ingenious cover generally means that even that chore is no longer so time-consuming as it once was, while the water in the pool is often heated to such a temperature that it has lost all power to shock or revive. The cool, mysterious, green-black depths of old-fashioned pools are seldom seen now: each pool is as bright as if one were in Hollywood.

The house, too, betrays evidence of money well spent. The fires in the main rooms look and smell delightful, but increase the danger, unimaginable in England until the present generation, that one might actually feel too hot while staying in the country in winter.

The many and interesting books have been well-shelved. There is an excellent piano. Prodigious quantities of plumbing have been installed, endless hot water is on tap and the kitchen is a marvellous combination of German machinery clad in Tuscan (or what I take to be Tuscan) carpentry.

The food is delicious, incorporating wonderful local ingredients as well as the riches of the Mediterranean, and the excellence of the wine is such that it comes, unlike my wine at home, in wooden cases.

The bedrooms are also a welcome contrast to our bedroom at home, where my wife and I will continue to sleep on a rock-hard futon until we can afford a decent bed. Our friends offer well-sprung beds to their visitors, and in place of our random mixture of stained and torn fabrics are found white curtains, white carpets, white bedding and white towels, all bought at the same time and all in mint condition, so that one views with dismay any accidental spillage, and may even feel obliged to spend part of the weekend surreptitiously scrubbing the carpet of the en suite bathroom in a vain attempt to restore it to its pristine whiteness.

How do I feel in such a paradise? Am I bitter and twisted? I believe this article will give more pleasure if I say that I am. It is certainly true that on our summer camping holidays, I have occasionally lost sight of the charm of the simple outdoor life and of sharing lukewarm showers with Dutchmen in plastic sandals, and have thought that renting a villa might be more the thing.

It is also true that the small, scruffy London house we bought last August, the mortgage on which consumes a great part of my earnings, is the same size as the first houses some of my more far-sighted contemporaries bought in London soon after leaving university, during the long period when I was happy to rent a room in a flat belonging to friends and to try to write novels, of which the first chapters were generally not just the best, but the only ones to be completed.

It is also true that I find myself forced by my own improvidence to resort to a genre which one of my best customers calls, with a merry laugh, "the journalism of humiliation". After breakfast, I retire to the converted garage at the back of the house, which has developed an alarming damp problem, and write with some degree of inside knowledge about my own mistakes.

My wife is also worried that with this article, I will cause gratuitous and unintended offence to all our hosts who have trampolines, which seems to be just about all of them. But when we go to stay for the weekend with prosperous old friends who have moved to the country, I hope I am filled with a proper sense of gratitude and pleasure, which I try to show by eating and drinking to excess, by admiring the improvements that have been made since we were last there, by telling my children to behave and by making token efforts to wash the dishes or fill the log basket. My convenient belief is that, with old friends, differences in fortune ought not to form an insuperable barrier.

If I were a more energetic and forceful character, I might be incentivised by the sight of all these lovely things, and set myself to earn the money to acquire them. I am certainly able, like many Englishmen, to turn the pages of Country Life and to fantasise about the estate I will buy when I unexpectedly come into money.

Yet in real life, and bearing in mind my indolent inability to become a successful banker, businessman or lawyer, I feel that Mr Duncan Smith is on to something with his talk about a party for the poor. The Conservative leader was appalled to discover, on visits to inner-city housing estates, that "society is really being hollowed out from the inside, and it's quite frightening to think that, in 21st-century Britain, we have actually gone backwards in many senses". He also recognises that great damage was done to the Conservatives in the past when "we allowed ourselves to be pushed into a box that just got marked 'self-interest'."

In other words, Mr Duncan Smith is not just talking - as he certainly ought - about our duty to help the genuinely poor. He is also talking about the idea the middle class has of itself. Is the point of life to get as rich as one possibly can? To pose the question is to answer it. For most of us, whether we are teachers or politicians or chartered accountants, success cannot be measured in exclusively financial terms.

If it could be, most of us would have to account ourselves failures, because we have not made as much money as we might have done. As Mr Duncan Smith has recognised, "enrichissez vous" will not do as a political programme: first, because many of us will never reckon we have managed to follow that injunction, but second, because even a large number of those who have managed to enrich themselves still regard it as an intolerably vulgar slogan.

This is, nowadays, a half-submerged current in English life. For a long time after the Second World War, it was considered rather vulgar to flaunt money, even if one happened to have it. Manners were considered very much more important than cash.

It seems to me that this quiet and tactful England still exists to a greater extent than one would think from watching television or from going to see such vivid portraits of foul-mouthed decadence as Jerry Springer: The Opera, now showing at the National Theatre in London.

It was an England of cold houses and faded loose covers, where habits of behaviour, and of knowing your obligations to your fellow men, were understood as the slow accretion of centuries. It was an England, certainly, of intense class consciousness, but was that worse than the patronising modern pretence of classlessness? Mr Blair and his cronies in the new ruling class admire money too unreservedly. Mr Duncan Smith is right to want a party that is also for the poor.