When she’s gone he wonders how long it’s going to take to cleanse himself. Amanda said that Fleur wanted to know where she stood. Those were her words. And he, the last of the Tubal dynasty, where does he stand? He has done things he is ashamed of and yet he knows that his shame is in some respects a pretence, because what he is doing will soon end the drawn-out hypocrisy. It was different back in Moses’s day when the little outsider dealt fairly with the Gentiles, so that they trusted him and he built up a fortune on his reputation. Now the family are not even Jews any more – and much taller – and what they are doing is utterly pointless: they are charging a premium, a kind of snob appeal disguising the very basic business of retail banking. And they are the establishment now: from Estonia to Etonia as some wag put it. The establishment is now a marketing concept. His father lavished tens of millions on art and ballet and theatre to disguise the fact: his philanthropy gave him access to a world – and women – he loved, but it didn’t really give him a grain of credibility. The Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne and various galleries fêted and flattered him and the crazy thing was he believed them. He saw himself as a prince-patron, not merely a rich man.

I don’t want any of this for my children. This rotten crumbling industry resting on greed and half-truths; this pretence that Tubal’s itself is somehow special, that the people who work in banking are particularly talented, that the government is principled, that the old country still possesses ancient wisdom and deeply bedded human standards.

It’s all a sham: the ludicrous royal family in their castles and palaces, the Army pounding away hopelessly at mud houses in recalcitrant villages far away, the wretched government with its desperate determination to save its skin by issuing more and more ineptly populist statements of intent and benchmarks and guidelines and tables and unenforceable laws. And worst of all, we, the bankers, believing we could produce money out of thin air. Instead we lost nearly £600m.