Howard Jacobs belongs to Britain’s traditional ruling tribe, known to his compatriots as “toffs”, and he bears its distinguishing marks of extreme height, a striped City shirt and not having lived at home as a child. Our breakfast this morning is also traditional “toff”: tea, crumpets and porridge.

Yet, as everyone knows, Jacobs’ tribe has been losing its grip on Britain. We breakfast in one of the tribe’s lost domains: Liverpool Street in the City of London, which, like most of Britain’s commanding heights, is now ruled by foreigners. Nonetheless, marks of the toffs’ reign remain everywhere. Jacobs, a retired lawyer, is the London organiser of the tribe’s spring fertility rite: next Saturday’s Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race.