At Luton the Citation is standing by, making low noises and trembling, like a fridge. Private jets have come down in price and the board has decreed that they may still be used where discretion is needed. Len assures him that he will be here on Wednesday to pick him up; his face is rumpled with honest concern, like Sid James’s in the Carry On films his father loved. Len calls him ‘Mr Julian’. Soon the plane is surging into the darkening sky and he accepts a drink from Kevin, co-pilot and steward. These executive-jet companies have some quaint ideas: there’s always champagne and pâté de foie gras and Stilton and smoked salmon and malt whisky as though they imagine that’s all their clients will eat. In his experience the old rich, at least, like fish cakes and jam roly-poly. His father loved cottage pie. Julian accepts a slender smoked-salmon sandwich. The pilots are joshing, chubby young men from the deep, rugby-playing suburbs.

Usually he finds flights relaxing. Once you are up there in the nothingness you can plunge deep into your own thoughts. But tonight he is troubled. The family trust is lodged in Liechtenstein and with the help of his lawyers, his brother and compliant auditors, he has unlocked it to provide £250m. to the bank. It’s a loan with a limited life, but still he is glad his father won’t know anything about it. In fact he’s dreading signing the deeds. The cabin lights are dimmed and he’s now sitting all alone in a bright cone directed from the overhead lamp towards his table. The light seems to suggest that he is under interrogation. It’s at these moments he knows that he is not really cut out to be a financial mogul. Up front the chubby but sensible Kevin and James are steering the plane blithely towards Zurich where a car will be waiting to take him to Liechtenstein. Years of family discretion dictates that they never, apparently, set foot in Liechtenstein, where wealth tax is 0.16 per cent per annum. In fact this will be only the second time he has visited, but the deeds need signing urgently and quietly, and out of sight of the ratings agencies, regulators and financial journalists. Every boardroom and every lawyer’s office in London leaks like a sieve. The ABA rating has been a prized asset for twenty-five years. He tries to take comfort from the fact that the bank has been in trouble more than once in the years since Moses Tubal first hung out his shingle in 1671. In 1847 the bank underwrote the Argentine River Plate Company, which failed. Only a loan from the Rothschilds kept them afloat then.