The old ruling class may not have been destroyed, but it is far from loved. We may want to see how an Edwardian kitchen worked, as Downton Abbey allows us to do, and to gawp at stately homes, but we lost the deferential respect for their owners long ago.

Our rulers know it. David Cameron, a descendant of William IV, calls himself Dave. Gideon Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary, changed his name to George. From their efforts to suppress the Bullingdon Club photograph of them wearing tailcoats and sneers, to their ostentatious attacks on the benefits of higher-rate taxpayers, they exhibit a desperate desire to show that the return of the aristocracy does not mean that privileged men will be helping their own kind.

They realise that an appeal to the virtues of hierarchy and noblesse oblige cannot sustain a government. Nor can it sustain a drama.