The first arrest of the weekend at Badminton Horse Trials occurred at 7:17 p.m. on Saturday. Fight, separation, removal, detention, escape, capture, arrest. Events had accelerated in the preceding hours on the Duke of Beaufort’s estate. With the day’s racing over, there was nothing to punctuate the drinking and the drugs. Attendees gathered at Lakeside – an enclosed boozing zone on the grassy, tented banks of a 600-foot-long pond – and consumed until nightfall. ‘Badminton is the best event of the year,’ said Ollie, a late-teen boy familiarising himself with the attractions. ‘Fanny, beer, horses. What else do you want?’

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There is some disagreement about which event marks the beginning of the traditional social ‘season’, but Country Life says it is Badminton, and I trust them, so I went. We live in a Britain today whose political relationship with the posh has rarely been as hostile – hereditaries extracted from the Lords, taxes thumped on inherited farms, VAT forced on private schools… I wanted to see how they were holding up. I was curious whether in Badminton our upper class would be defiant or in retreat. Had they turned on Britain? Had the government killed their season? Was posh dead?

OK. No.........

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