Our ruling class has lost its sprezzatura. To Baldassare Castiglione, who coined the word in 1528, this signified ‘the effortless resolution of all difficulties’. At Eton only a few decades ago, the watchword was ‘effortless superiority’. These days, however, it might as well be ‘effortful superiority’. More than ever, the British elite want to convince the proles that they are tireless workaholics. Equally, they want us to believe that they aren’t elite at all.

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, sociology professors at Oxford and the LSE respectively, open their book with an interview with a retired corporate lawyer. ‘Complete rubbish,’ they are told when they insinuate that he’s a member of the elite. ‘I had to build my career from scratch.’ The vigorous refutation might have rung true were it not for the fact that they were in the drawing room of his seven-bedroom Bloomsbury townhouse with a ginormous self-portrait hanging opposite them. Or that this rather well-spoken, polite chap was once described in the national press as a ‘Giant of the City’. Or that his net worth is over £10 million (anything over £2 million puts you in the UK’s top 1 per cent). Or that his grandfather was president of one of the royal colleges for medical professionals and his father a senior civil servant. Or that he himself moved from boarding school through Oxford to a Magic Circle law firm, where he became a senior partner before taking up seats on a number of boards. Or that, when a bill threatening to harm his clients was passing through Parliament, he spoke about the matter to ‘senior ministers’, who proceeded to ‘take the teeth out’ of the legislation. Or that his porky Rolodex includes ‘senior figures at the Bank of England, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and several members of the royal family’.

Deflecting privilege, Reeves and Friedman tell us, is par for the course nowadays. But ‘elite disidentification’, as they call it with clunky sociological precision, ought not to distract us from the ‘persistence of elite reproduction’. With nods to Ralph Miliband, the Marxist doyen of class analysis, they argue that things