Is there anything people enjoy more than watching the entitled classes fall crashing down to earth? Any glance at the news at the moment will reveal princes and politicians dragged through the mud, others squirming as they await their turn in the gutter. Is it just their actions we revile, or is there also an element of schadenfreude in watching their demise?

For centuries the British were taught to be cap-doffers, deferring to our social superiors and assuming that being born ‘above’ us, made them better human beings. The tide began to turn with WWI, and the realisation that the working classes were little more than cannon fodder being fed to the enemy by Old Boy colonels from their Mayfair clubs. All is fair in love and war, unless you’re a newly recruited private sent to the Somme. And for sure the ensuing shortage of both heirs and male workforce created a seismic shift for the ruling classes.

It took the Profumo Scandal of 1963 to turn the accepted social order thoroughly on its head, however. Over the course of several months, the public devoured stories of aristocratic misdemeanours as the Establishment, and ultimately the Government, was brought down by two young working-class women. Finally the revolution was underway, and the was proof was in: we’re all just human, after all.

Readers of books are no different to those of newspapers, as we chip away at the mystique of those hidden from us by high walls and deep moats. Who has not read Tess of the d’Urbervilles and not been outraged at the peasant heroine’s treatment by the upper classes? Nor followed with some satisfaction the declining fortunes of the Ayres family in Sarah Waters’ A Little Stranger as their ancestral home and privileges slowly slip away from them?

And yet … our fascination with this group of little more than 5000 blue-blooded people still draws us Downton Abbey and Saltburn, slavering over Vanity Fair and Brideshead Revisited. Maybe, in some nostalgic corner of our collective memory, we remember the place our ancestors occupied. It seems we’re not quite ready for Madame Guillotine.

FIVE SILVER SPOONS (Hope Fenton Book 1) is published by ALLISON & BUSBY