‘They had already given large sums of money to New Labour. They were major supporters of Tony Blair when he mounted his leadership bid in 1994, and they’d been with him in Downing Street when he won the election three years later. My father was involved in early talks relating to the Millennium Dome and might well have gone into the House of Lords if … things hadn’t happened the way they did.

‘My parents had moved to the village of Moxham Heath in the early nineties. I’m afraid I can’t really describe what it was like, living in the middle of Wiltshire, because I wasn’t there very much. I was either at school or I stayed in London. We’d kept our house off Sloane Square. To this day, I’m not sure why they’d decided that country life would suit them, particularly as they were opposed to so many of its traditions, but let me say at once that it was without any question the worst decision they ever made. It all went wrong from the moment they bought Moxham Hall, which was a quite unnecessarily large country house with a hundred acres just outside the village. Arriving by helicopter didn’t help either. My father flew it himself.

‘It was them and us – although not perhaps drawn across classical lines. This was a time when the Tories were losing power, and maybe there was a degree of resentment in what had always been a true-blue Tory shire. I don’t know. My parents weren’t just rich. There were plenty of rich people in Moxham. They were rich socialists. They supported the Labour opposition to hunting. They wanted to build a wind turbine, and you can imagine that that put a great many people’s backs up. Spoiling the view! Killing a few birds before the locals had a chance to gun them down! My father had been part of the Campaign for Lead-Free Air, so having their own helicopter pad made them hypocrites too. I kept out of it, but I still remember there was one squabble after another. The swimming pool. The footpath they wanted to move ten metres. The church-hall restoration fund. The annual village fête. This was little England and the two of them were incomers and hypocrites … at least, that was the perception. Nothing they did was ever right.

‘Maybe that was why they decided to send Stephen to the village school – Moxham Heath Primary. That was one of the things that Throsby suggested in her book. They were using him to ingratiate themselves with the villagers, to prove that they were “one of them”. It was complete nonsense, it goes without saying. But she wrote it anyway.

‘I need to describe my younger brother to you. Up to the age of nine – before he left London – he was a very quiet boy. He loved reading. He did well at school. He had plenty of friends. Harriet Throsby described him as spoilt and although it’s not a word I would have used, he was certainly indulged. This was because to all intents and purposes he was an only child. My parents always used to say he was an afterthought – although he was much loved and cherished.