In the profile piece I’d read about him, it said he’d done an enormous amount of work with charities and had ploughed millions of pounds into a state-of-the-art cancer research facility in south London, neither of which it was even remotely possible to criticize him for. Otherwise, his comments didn’t entirely ring true. Most of his wealth – not including the property portfolio he inherited from his parents, who died a year after he finished his Politics MA – was accumulated via his father’s stakes in two vast multinational oil companies, and in a media group that went on to create the world’s largest video-sharing platform. He’d made money of his own by funding Internet start-ups, some extremely successful, but all of it was built on the mountains of cash he was still making from his father’s old investments.

‘Ever think about giving up the day job?’ I asked him.

‘You mean, at the Foreign Office?’ He pursed his lips. ‘I’ve thought about it.’

‘But Whitehall is just too much of a pull?’

This time he laughed. ‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. It’s not really a day job in the proper sense of the word. I have a desk and an office there, I do a couple of days a week most weeks, and, yes, in the 1990s and early 2000s I chose to spend a lot of time abroad, working in various roles for high commissions and embassies – so, in that respect, I have been a bona fide diplomat. But I have lots of other business interests, more now than ever, and they suck up a lot of time, so over the past ten to fifteen years I’ve had a much looser brief with the FCO. I turn up at events, I wine and dine, and I leverage my contacts in order to advance the UK’s standing.’ He stopped, frowning, as if realizing how that came across. ‘That sounds terribly boastful. What I mean is, I do what I can to help them.’

It was hard to know if that was any less immodest.