It’s that time of year again. No sooner have you recovered from Christmas than the posh start talking about their skiing jaunts planned for the February half-term. But let’s use the term posh advisedly, because – make no mistake – skiing is now anything but. Where once flinging yourself down the Cresta Run may have been a solid-gold toff signifier or ‘the Sloanest sport’, according to class anthropologist Peter York, now it simply means that you’re rich. No snow cannon pumping out snow on the low slopes can fool anyone. The fact that ski resorts are now melting before our eyes seems to be where this social morality tale ends.

Skiing and British class have long been caught in a complicated embrace. When Sir Arnold Lunn founded the Kandahar Ski Club in 1924 in the Alpine village of Mürren, his masterstroke was to elide ideas of British imperial dominance in the Raj with an infallible plan for victory: foolhardiness. ‘The object of a turn is to get round a given obstacle losing as little speed as possible,’ he said, daring generations of bonkers chins to do their worst.

Similarly, it was Major William Henry Bulpett who apocryphally created the death-defying Cresta Run in St Moritz in the late 19th century, apparently because he was bored. Here were the British upper-middle........

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