A little British row is rolling about this summer, waiting for its time to become – or to fail to become – a scandal. A television documentary is planned, to be aired some time before the next general election, on the Bullingdon Club, a champagne and window-smashing resort of Oxford toffs to which David Cameron, leader of the Conservative opposition, George Osborne, his shadow chancellor, and Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, all belonged. There are sensitivities that too vivid an exposure might undermine Mr Cameron’s determined rebranding of his party.

Yet the Tory worry may not just be overdone, but actually quite wrong. The Bullingdon Club excesses in which Mr Cameron, Mr Johnson and Mr Osborne reportedly partook may have been a vital rite of passage to power. As one of their college contemporaries, the writer Toby Young, put it in the Daily Mail newspaper: “They grasped that the theatrical element of Oxford’s secret clubs and societies, the fact that so much of their activity seemed designed to dazzle and mystify bemused onlookers, is precisely what makes them such ideal training grounds for British public life.”