A Class of Their Own, by

middle – and it stops you in your tracks – is the most tender of letters to a fragile mistress, as he ends the relationship: ‘I wonder whether I am capable of this job without you. I will miss you horribly and painfully and the love that we have shared. I will still think about you and worry about you.’

Elsewhere, his famous friendship with President Trump has him tipped to become Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Washington.

The most outstanding revelations in the book are after Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister and the announcement of the 2019 General Election. The Brexit Party has just triumphed in the European elections with 29 seats. Farage declares back home his party is fielding a full slate of candidates. The Sunday Times warns that he is paving the way for a hard-left Government. The secret negotiations to strike a deal with the Conservatives to prevent the vote splitting grow more and more intense right up to the close of nominations at 4pm. By then, the Brexit Party candidates have been halved.

Farage claims he was offered a place in the Lords by two separate people at No 10. Another Brexit MEP is told he might become Transport Minister. It’s suggested that eight former Brexit MEPs will be offered peerages. Crick calls it ‘serious criminal activity at the highest level’. In the event, no gongs change hands. The Brexit Party fails to win a single seat. The kingmaker is reduced in the results table to an asterisk.

Crick concludes that, while Farage can’t take sole credit for Brexit, it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much influence on British history. An arresting statement.

Except, for now, he is still 57-year-old Nigel from Kent, with no title before his name or letters after it. Just a former politician with an interview slot on GB News.

Poor little rich kids

NIKHIL KRISHNAN A Class of Their Own: Adventures in Tutoring the Super-Rich By Matt Knott Trapeze £25

Matt Knott is now a screenwriter; his memoir suitably has multiple plotlines.

The A plot is about the years he spent after university as a dogsbody to the children of the filthiest of rich. His B plot is a portrait of the author as a 20-something gay man in the big city year,’ says one worried mother. ‘I presumed she meant the lower end of the top third,’ the tutor observes. ‘God, I loved Biggles,’ says one wistful father, as he commands Knott to read the books aloud to his son; ‘as though he and the fictional pilot had conducted a torrid affair during the Battle of the Somme’.

Meanwhile, he klutzily attempts to make himself into a filmmaker. The ironic self-deprecation is a riskier strategy here. It’s one thing for him to admit to being a bit of a fraud as a teacher. As one frank housekeeper tells him, ‘Por favor, Mateo… Charge what you like. They can afford it.’

But revealing that he doesn’t know what ‘storyboarding’ is to a potential producer of his short film suggests that he has imbibed more of his schoolfriends’ chutzpah than he admits. Can he claim inferior status just because he doesn’t own a yacht?

To his credit, Knott raises the accusation himself. ‘You’re not exactly Oliver Twist,’ a friend tells him. ‘I am, compared to these kids,’ he replies – reasonably enough, but thereby reminding us that other, poorer children do exist. A few of them even appear in his story. For their families, an hour with a tutor represents a real sacrifice – perhaps even a meal or two skipped – ‘rather than a rounding error in a vast weekly budget’.

But it is the rich kids whose sadness seems to come as a surprise. Young ‘Felix’, who seems to have got through as many tutors as the Von Trapp children did governesses, announces, ‘Just want to stop breathing.’

‘If you do that, you’ll die,’ says Knott.

‘Good.’

Knott begins to appreciate the advantages of growing up as a member of the unaspirational middle class.

He eventually summons up some anger at the whole system but adds, guiltily, ‘I had tacitly endorsed my clients’ values and turned a blind eye to their behaviour.’ He leaves it there, content to be funny and to hint at depths left unexamined.

His publishers tell us the book has something to say about capitalism. I’m not sure it does. Affluence and status anxiety are older than capitalism, and vulgarity may well survive it. What Knott has written is a traditional comedy about old (human) vices in new (capitalist) bottles. He reminds us of what we already know: that great wealth confers neither happiness nor (in any sense that matters) class.

trying to make a short film and have a love life.

The first two plots are both played for laughs, poised somewhere between satire and farce. But the book also has a third, and sadder, C plot: about the desperate loneliness of the children he tutors, and his own dawning awareness of his complicity in the system he mocks.

Despite his private education and Cambridge degree, Knott identifies as one of the poor. His fees at school were paid by a bursary for ‘staff kids’. Arriving at parties for friends without a present, he is in the habit of writing ‘Don’t drink it all at once’ on a card he leaves by the Bollinger.

Graduating from university on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, he finds himself turning to ad hoc tutoring to pay the bills while he tries to make a career in film. Because he’s young, well-spoken and good-looking, the agency tells him he will ‘fit’ nicely into his clients’ lifestyles.

And so he finds himself set loose on children who range from the suffering to the insufferable, some neglected, some over-parented. He finds himself wandering through homes with private cinemas, private saunas and kitchen larders stocking £40 artichokes. Mothers flirt with him, neglected children mistake him for their absent (delinquent or incarcerated) fathers, and everyone assumes he knows how to get their children into Eton.

Soon, he is part of the retinue of staff and sycophants that accompanies the families on their (skiing, sailing, shooting) holidays. He is a well-paid ‘buddy’ to children who have no friends. His Cambridge degree makes him a ‘branded accessory’ – a sort of talking Gucci handbag.

Knott’s tone is tart. ‘Historically Horace was always in the top third of his

Nikhil Krishnan is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge