bedroomed million pound mansion set in 13 acres of Berkshire countryside and has a second home in one of the nicer suburbs of west London.
His insight into the average person's housing situation is imited accordingly.
In a witty aside during an after dinner speech last year, the old Etonian baronet remarked of the homeless: They are the sort of people you step on when you come out of the opera!
One's enjoyment of Pavarotti is resumabli marred by the Jniversity of Surrey study whic put overall homelessness in London at 130,000, effectively a shanty town 'as large as might be expected in a Latin American city.
In London alone, 2,000 sleep on the streets, the same figure as for 1904. But cardboard city is merely the most visible aspect of the capital's housing crisis.
Another 8,000 homeless are in benefit-funded hotels; 25,000 - including 7,000 children - are in bed and breakfast; and at least 30,000 squat, despite plans to make it a criminal offence. Tens of thousands of others sleep on the floors and sofas of friends and relatives.
A million homeless Over 418,000 were officially considered homeless in England alone last year, on a definition excluding single people and childless couples. Add those and the figures for the rest of the UK and the overall total may well exceed a staggering one million.
Additionally, 500,000 pensioners are living in houses officially designated unfit for human habitation.
Amidst this massive need, completions of social housing - that is, council and housing association accommodation together - fell from 126,000 dwellings in 1977 to just 35,000 in 1991-92.
London councils started only 363 the lowest figure since the war, and a 68 per cent drop on 1989: The picture has since worsened, the Association of London Authorities confirmed.
Even the government's own Audit Commission urges that 74,000 public sector houses be built every year for the next ten years.
While there are still over five million council houses in Britain, some 22 per cent of all dwellings, the Tories openly seek to abolish the sector altogether.
The 'right to buy policy has seen over a million units, generally the better stock, sold off since 1979. Policies such 12 Sept, 1992 No. 27 as Housing Action Trusts and compulsory competitive tendering of housing management should see off the rest. * Meanwhile, the quality of the stock continues to decline, now needing maintenance work costed at £8,500 million - over £2,000 for each home - according to the Audit Commission. Nevertheless, rents in England and Wales have risen 44 per cent since 1990, a quarter above inflation.
Even many so-called 'homeowners' -in reality, often people who have borrowed huge sums of money at high rates of interest in order to have a secure roof over their heads - are in deep trouble.
The Tories deliberately fuelled housing hyperinflation in the late eighties, pushing people into buying by closine down all other options while simultaneously relaxing credit and maintaining mortgage relief, a tax-break which even now costs over £5,800m a year. By 1987, London prices were rising £53 a day the recession, the fallacy of such policies is obvious. Some 1.5 million mortgages now amount to more than the accommod rth.
Over 300,00 origages - 3 per cent of the total - are six months or more in arrears, with repossessions this year certain to exceed 1991's 75,000.
The lost £1 billion The government now spends £1,000 million a year on paying mortgage in-. terest for the unemployed, which goes straight into building society coffers.
Tory backbenchers openly voice fears that the current state of the housing market could push the economy from its present deep recession into thirtiesstyle slump.
Top city accountants Touche Ross have been asked by Whitehall to carry out a secret study of the consequences On the street where they live: ignored by Labour's programme of a property crash. The brief includes the risk of social disorder.
Tackling the housing crisis would be an obvious priority for an incoming socialist government.
Among the short-term measures, extortionate taxes could be levelled on owners of the 600,000 private houses now lying empty, unless they are promptly let at reasonable rents.' Outright confiscation is not advocated in general, but one or two opera-goers might suddenly find themselves devoid of the odd eight-bedroomed mansion.
But the real answer lies in an emergency programme for the renovation of existing social housing and the building of good new publicly-owned stock The ownership fetishism so assiduously promoted in the eighties is the natural condition the Thatcherites painted, as the experience of other capitalist countries with substantial rented sectors demonstrates Many people - students, those who jobs require mobility, those forced into buying against their will - actually prefer affordable, secure tenancies on decent flats and houses.
Nationalisation of building soueues - the de facto policy of President Reagan after their US equivalents found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy -would enable people that wish to buy to do so, while opening an escape route for those caught in the mortgage trap.
Loans could be written off in full, with fair tenancy agreements put in their place; the better the home, the higher the rent.
Sixties nightmare estates, where still structurally sound, can be turned into nice places to live through imaginative replanning - as one or two local authorities proved even during the Thatcher years.
Few people, however, would be sorry to see the worst tower blocks dynamited down. A beneficial side effect of the whole programme would be the creation of thousands of jobs in the depressed construction sector.
But where are any of these ideas to be found now? Even Harold Wilson be came prime minister on the promise to Labour's 1992 manifestes di year; build 400,000 new homes a promise a single one.
John Heartfield