We straight white Oxbridge-educated males who rule Britain are used to periodic rumblings of discontent from below. Now the transvestite artist Grayson Perry, writing in the New Statesman magazine, has savaged what he calls “Default Man”: “With their colourful textile phalluses hanging round their necks, they make up an overwhelming majority in government, in boardrooms and also in the media.” The writer Caitlin Moran half-jokes that she is the only working-class Briton with a newspaper column: “I have the entire quota.”

Indeed, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission notes that 59 per cent of the British cabinet, three-quarters of senior judges, half of diplomats, etc, went to Oxbridge. The typical chief executive attended Oxbridge or Harvard, says business data firm Qlik. Few of these people are women. Even those of us who groom the lower slopes of the establishment – pundits, MPs, and so forth – tend to be Oxbridge men.

My caste produces the opinions that most British people are expected to swallow. However, the one topic we seldom discuss honestly is our own rule. So let me try to describe how it looks from up here.