Peter York and his intrepid co-author Olivia Stewart-Liberty start by telling us, with a whiff of tragedy, that everything has changed: ‘The Sloane is a beast almost unrecognisable from twenty-five years ago. The Sloane culture we described then was a rather secret garden, neither the grandest toffs, nor the aspirant commercial middle-middles, but something else in between. Now they were competing with other types and other breeds from other places (the transformation of the City in the 80s was the start of the process that turned South Kensington into a major French metropolis by 2010; today, the biggest single group in French Ken’ work in financial services).

And certainly it’s been argued that Kate Middleton, born the year that The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published, has helped revive the type, with Prince Harry doing the same for the men.

The book sold more than a million copies, was reprinted several times, dominated the Publishers Weekly charts for the next two years, and recently featured 87th in the Sunday Times’s bestselling books since the list began 40 years ago.

She spent her evenings at the theatre, and at the Linguists’ Club studying German, or the Times’s swimming club and weekends in Oxford with her boyfriend, Neville Dent. All such traits were easily emulated by outsiders, of course, and they were: for a while, Sloane Rangers seemed to have the life it was only sensible to want.The rest of the country was still boarding up factories and shedding jobs, and the real early 80s tonics to the nation were strictly symbolic: victory in the Falklands War and the royal wedding. These things are not unimportant in British life — intimations of class and the like’, York tells me. If Sloanes had long been resistant to seeing themselves as such, crucially, so well-established did the stereotype become that it was finally acknowledged as faintly comical even by those who most embodied it – those silly nicknames were suggested by the ‘Sloane Name Generator’, published in 2015 by, of all publications, Tatler. But aspiration only took you so far – you could access the right look, but you’d have to put on the right accent.

With the weight loss, today’s Sloane has better legs, and a smaller bust, and she wears figure-hugging Issa dresses to flaunt the transformation. So when the time came to pitch around some titles for a new publishing imprint, York came up with The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook and threw it on the pile. I was expecting something about gas bills or insurance payouts, so I was taken aback when she asked “are you worried about rising social inequality?After what had seemed like decades of an intellectual moratorium on big picture discussion of class and inequality, it was everywhere (I’d been told by broadcasters before 2008 “that’s so not today’s issue,” when I’d wanted to look at the rich as anything but lifestyle options, and immediately after 2008 it was off the table). As a consequence, year by year it continued unchanged and so became a pillar of the British motoring establishment that all patriots could be proud of. But however extravagantly different this new group was, they wanted what they’d heard of for their children, the famous public schools and the university places.