George Osborne chewed his pencil nervously. It tasted funny. He worried where it had been. But his fellow Bullingdon boy Nat Rothschild had assured him he had burned all those pencils. Maybe this one had escaped the inferno.

It was Wednesday evening. Our conscience-stricken chancellor required sustenance. Lashed by the twin madames of ethics and economics, a weakened George Osborne had his servant call Byron Hamburgers, a deluxe tenderised meat patty outlet with branches all over west London. Soon a flattened circle of meat lay near the chancellor’s left hand, the rich aroma inflaming both of his proud equine nostrils, and making one of his white legs tremble excitedly. George Osborne would need all the strength he could muster to sign off the punitive savings his heart told him the country deserved. And only an expensive meat parcel could supply that strength. George Osborne bit into the Byron burger. He felt the elasticated waistband of his underpant tighten, cutting the blood to his round buttocks, as he drove his pencil down hard upon the signature space of the spending review. There! The deed was done.

The scenario above is sheer satirical fantasy, of course, and it is lazy of the left to make political capital out of the fact that the chancellor made welfare savings while eating a burger, even if it was a more expensive burger than any the average welfare claimant could ever afford. But it is hardly a state secret that Byron burgers are extremely popular with the right-wing politicos who dwell in the leafy paradise of west London. Byron is run by Tom Byng, a member of the same Old Etonian cabal as David Cameron himself and Boris Johnson. And the mass of juicy meat that top Tories ate in Byng’s previous restaurant, Zucca, saw it described as the de facto works canteen of the Cameron set. Even Nicholas Clegg extols Byron Burger’s succulent flattened beef pads. The coalition has bonded over Byron burgers, and all its key players are proud to stand before their fellows and declare, “Ich bin ein Byronburger”.

But at what cost? The political class live in a west London playground no longer sullied by the unsightly poor, who have been ousted by housing benefit cuts and rent hikes. But where have they gone? And can the right’s sudden and conspicuous consumption of Byron burgers be mere coincidence? Check Byron’s progress on Google maps and you’ll see the shaped-meat retailer’s eastern push follows the line of London’s gentrification, and the enforced economic exodus of its underclass, in a microcosmic reflection of national trends towards the disappearance of the dispossessed. The crushed-beef chain’s surge into once neglected areas like Hoxton and Tower Hamlets, while welcomed by venal estate agents looking for evidence that their patch is up and coming, is bad news for indigenous people. Chelsea types, in their pink trousers and yellow jumpers, are coming, displacing ordinary people, even as they themselves are ousted from the verdant pasture of their own west London homelands by the property power of Russian mafia and wealthy Arab spring escapees. New Byron branches in Manchester and Liverpool reflect similar spurts of gentrification. The rich are eating at Byron in places where the poor once ate at Chicken Cottage, a name I will appropriate for my rural retreat when I too am finally displaced from the capital.

The food press spin on the old Etonian Tom Byng’s company is that it represents a kind of credible indie alternative to the corporate McDonald’s and Burger King chains. But earlier this month The Times reported that Jacob Rothschild, the father of Osborne’s Bullingdon Club associate Nat Rothschild, is considering buying Byng’s big burger business, though his plan to rename it as Bilder Burger has been seen as a potential PR disaster.

Crazed conspiracy theorists have placed the Rothschilds at the centre of bizarre and sinister speculations for centuries, but can their proposed annexation of Byron Hamburgers at this stage in Osborne’s savings programme mean nothing? The Rothschild family’s investments and intelligence are said to have determined the favourable outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, thus inflating the value of British currency. Why, in a time of austerity, has Osborne suddenly pledged millions to preserve the site of the battlefield? Is there a connection?

David Cameron’s (now largely abandoned) appeals to the faith community to make his noble Big Society dream a reality seemed to exploit the possibility of eternal life as a reward for good works, hoping that the promise of heaven might incentivise the faithful into charitable actions, absolving the state of its financially unsustainable duty of care. But Cameron’s doubtless sincere belief that the human spirit has a life, a value even, beyond the physical vessel that carries it is not one that is shared by Osborne’s savings programme.

A pragmatic and bold realist, Osborne is, in essence, trying to balance the books in regard to the cost of the physical presence, in Britain, of each individual citizen. Does an individual earn the nation more, in the long term, than it costs the nation to keep them alive? And if not, how can the costs they generate be offset? We must continue our progress away from intensive care and out on to an abandoned trolley in a lonely hospital corridor. Is there some way of, to coin a current coalition buzzword, monetising the actual physical presence of the individual citizen?

Byron’s standard 6oz classic burger retails at £6.75. The average British person weighs 12st. There are 224 ounces in a stone. 224 x 12 = 2688. 2688 divided by 6 = 448. 448 x £6.75 = £3,024. In partnership with Byron, as the chain plays its part in the ongoing displacement and disappearance of the poor, Osborne is theoretically able to offer a return of up to £3,024 on potential meat provision units which, if left to deteriorate at their current level, may be nothing but a lifelong drain on the national balance.

Osborne knows this partnership offers a drastic solution, which may prove unpopular with the electorate, even one primed to view benefit claimants as the enemy. Revealing the full extent of the programme’s current operating levels will take caution. In the meantime, Clegg, Osborne, Cameron and their friends continue to eat Byron burgers with gusto. It is almost as if they are trying to dispose of the evidence.

Stewart Lee is curating a week of recordings of the best stand-ups in the world ever, as The Alternative Comedy Experience, from the 8-12 July at the Stand, Edinburgh. Tickets at www. thestand.co.uk