Mike is helping with the tea and biscuits at the Saturday open morning of St Andrew’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne, East Sussex. His is the authentic face of the genteel middle class: beleaguered, careworn and perplexed by the way the country is going.

“My biggest worry is that I got myself into something eight years ago that I couldn’t afford then and that I can’t afford now,” he says. Mike, 48, works in business development and his wife Paula is an administrator. Their two eldest children went to St Andrew’s, a co-educational feeder for Eastbourne College, the highly rated independent secondary school that both now attend.