Daniel was educated in a state comprehensive school and is the first in his immediate family to go to university. Looking back at Oxford in the 1980s, knowing what he knows now, Kuper sees the beginning of a sort of posh counter-revolution.

Instead, he favours a reporter’s diligence with facts and footnotes as he traverses British public life by stepping from one Oxford graduate to another, rarely having to set foot on solid ground. Discover your next non-fiction read and brilliant book gifts in the Profile newsletter, and find books to help you live well with Souvenir Press. One of the biggest culture shocks, he says, was British people’s obsession with class and where they were in the hierarchy. As do less recognisable but very influential players, like ardent Brexiteer Daniel (now Baron) Hannan, co-founder of the Vote Leave campaign. In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War.The Independent wrote that "Simon Kuper is a refreshing antidote to the current media obsession with 'getting the nannies [nanny goats = quotes]', however banal, from players. Kuper does acknowledge that some Oxonians approached euroscepticism intelligently, ie Daniel Hannan, and that Brexit would’ve been impossible without the leadership of Nigel Farage, who had the common sense to avoid university altogether. By 2007, Rory Stewart – who had gone from Eton and Oxford to Iraq and Afghanistan – was observing that in the upper echelons of the Tory party: “Churchill had been replaced by Bertie Wooster. They’re gifted it by fairy godmothers, then have it nurtured at Eton/ Winchester/Charterhouse/Shrewsbury/wherever and honed at Oxford.

The bounder is the rogue of his school, who doesn’t do his ‘prep’, smokes behind the rugger field, breaks bounds, romances girls and is always getting into ‘scrapes’. In fact, argues Kuper, “the ‘very, very bright future’ that he saw for post-Brexit Britain applied in spades [only] to himself. TheSecretLifeOfJohnLeCarré is the story of what was left out, and offers reflections on the difficult relationship between biographer and subject.Kuper captures 1980s Oxford nicely, but his argument that it poisoned national life only holds water if you think Brexit was wicked. Kuper is alert to the deficiencies of the Oxford Union style, the tendency to substitute some glib debating point for hard-headed analysis . Like his role model Churchill, Boris Johnson spent years mastering the ancient craft of public speaking. Organisations like ‘Class Act’ or ‘First Gen Soc’ try and bridge this gap to build up state-school networks and are growing in strength particularly since emerging from coronavirus.

He doesn't mince his words: talking of past greats, he dismisses Bobby Charlton as "a dullard", Michel Platini "a weak character" and Pele "a talking puppet.

Kuper’s point is that this was the seedbed for Brexit, that a generation of young men – and they’re all men – who hadn’t known war, didn’t know how to do anything practical, entered politics with a singular talent for performance. In the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, that trend had reversed and the upper classes got their confidence back.