The debauched posh are back

‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his dull middle-class muckers in order to ‘drown in honey’ (also champagne, Catholicism and plover’s eggs) with Sebastian and his rich Oxford set.

By the time I arrived at university at the turn of the century, debauchery had long been democratised. John Lennon had smoked a spliff in the gents at Buckingham Palace, while another working-class hero, Julie Burchill, reckons she hoovered up enough gak to ‘stun the entire Colombian armed forces’. Acquiring a massive habit was no longer the preserve of the Marquess of Marchmain’s son. Spend a few quid in one of the clubs I frequented in Edinburgh in the late 1990s and early 2000s and your jaw would soon be swinging wildly alongside those of a duke’s daughter and a welder from Fife.