IN THE sumptuous film of Vanity Fair, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers portrays that perennial stereotype, the arrogant rich pup. George Osborne is a second-generation parvenu, born to wealth and pleasure and a dilettante military career (until Waterloo unexpectedly kills him). Faithfulness, frugality and politeness to those who earn a living are alien, ludicrously lower-class concepts to him. “Emotional intelligence” has not marked his education; but neither is he held together by ancient notions of chivalry and noblesse oblige. Thackeray views George with horrified fascination. He’d be even more horrified to know that two centuries on, he’s still around.

For last week, while the world was staring at Prince Harry’s swastika, more news emerged of the notorious Bullingdon Club of Oxford. Last month 14 of them — the ringleader being Prince Harry’s cousin, Alexander Fellowes — turned up “well-dressed and immaculately behaved” at the White Hart pub in Fyfield, ate their starter and then began shouting, smashing bottles and fighting until blood and wine ran down the walls.

The police were called. Four were locked up overnight and released with £80 fixed-penalty fines. None got an ASBO. The landlord says: “They get away with it because they have money . . . they scared my other customers and wrecked one of my rooms. Even when I got them out of the door they smashed a window with a bottle.”

Responding to this story, a former member of the Bullingdon, Harry Mount, explained that it is a “ritual”. He personally paid £100 “to be rolled down a hill in a Portaloo by a Hungarian count”. Yet “from my Bullingdon generation there are four businessmen, three bankers, three lawyers, two art historians, two journalists and an MP”. This apologia was echoed, apropos of Prince Harry, by Adam Nicolson. He writes that when he was at Cambridge he smashed milk bottles and played a game of getting down a street by walking over cars. “No one gave a second thought to whether we were damaging them. We bent down car aerials . . . to make a hurdle course. We stood on the roof of the college and threw bicycles into the street so we could see what happened when cars collided with them.” He insists that this stuff is useful for “acquiring the moral sense you will later need” and records that his companions in criminal damage are now senior in “TV channels, accountancy firms, the law, City banks . . .” etc.

Well, of course they are, you prat! They were rich, protected, unlikely to get prison records because their families could smooth the feathers of those whose property and peace they destroy. There is a sliver of British society — a very small sliver — that still lives in a different world to the vast, well-behaved middle-class majority, and disdains it. Their young run easily out of control: like the underclass yob, who at least has the excuse of poverty, these rich boys cannot see outside their own rut. It is social autism. In past centuries they might be checked by rigid conventions and parental severity. Now, they aren’t. Their parents bought in to part of modern middle-class childrearing — its indulgence and friendly unjudgmental attitudes — but unfortunately omitted to put in the time, the talk and the closeness which make such modern parenting work. The result is a tribe of well-spoken savages.

Some of them are bright, and join the Bullingdon; some are not. Hark at the mother of Prince Harry’s friend Guy Pelly, defending the royal twit with the line that his swastika was useful because it highlighted “the debate about Auschwitz” (er, what debate would that be, exactly?). The good lady continues that her own son’s dressing-up as the Queen in a grey wig “is certainly not disrespectful . . . no more disrespectful than for a white man to dress as a black man. I myself went as a penguin.” O Lord above, where can you start?

I do not wish to be unkind. All human beings have value, and silly youths may grow into decent people. This sliver of “high” society, hermetically sealed from general reality, should not matter. But unfortunately, it does.

It matters because the Prince of Wales has allowed himself and his sons — especially the younger — to confine their friendships to a widely distrusted set of rude hedonists. Prince Harry has his own “Club H” bar in the cellars of Highgrove. He has not yet trashed a restaurant, but has been involved in rowdy lock-ins, barred from a pub after calling a French barman a “f****** frog”, stripped naked at a party, been photographed drunk, giving the finger and attacking a photographer. Barely three weeks after the Queen’s careful broadcast about racial diversity he — and his supposedly brighter brother — saw no problem in a party themed on “colonials and natives”. Nor, it would appear, did his father, who would not interrupt a prolonged Scottish holiday with his mistress to see his sons. See what I mean about adopting modern light-touch parenthood, but forgetting the bit about actually being there?

I am a monarchist. I think it is a useful check on the vaulting vainglory of politicians. I vastly respect the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Princess Royal for the hardworking (really rather middle-class) way they have served the nation. As a member of the busy bourgeoisie — or, as one friend calls them, the Behaving Classes — I easily empathise with their values.

Yet my heart plummets when I consider the future. The three next heirs to the throne — perhaps partly because of media pressure — have grown a siege mentality, retreating into their spoilt coterie in an Edwardian manner, divorcing themselves and their instincts from the nation’s. Now, workaday Britain doesn’t think much of them. Prince Harry’s mistake and half-hearted “apology” may be a small thing. But the arrogant self-indulgence of Clarence House, reflected in princely tantrums from the heir and in his sons’ hooray friends, is doing real and incalculable harm.

Perhaps it can be reversed. I hope so. But it will take effort. Meanwhile, long live our gracious Queen. Very long.

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