I left Cambridge a couple of years ago and applied for a job in management consultancy, partly ironically. I turned up at the interview and did a straight-faced pisstake, talking incessantly about how I was attracted to the firm because their “synergy” and “dynamism” would combine excellently with my “outstanding inter-personal skills”. To my surprise and amusement, the corporate drone in front of me lapped it up. I could tell he was the kind of mind-numbingly tedious moron who would like Coldplay. He made me want to join some monumentally savage Marxist paramilitary group. But, at this point in my last year at Cambridge – cliché of clichés – I decided that I wanted a well-paying job, and so I took up the offer and became a management consultant. My reasoning was thus: as Spike Milligan put it, “money doesn’t buy you happiness – but it does buy you a better form of misery.”

And yet, while I was living off my parents’ money at Cambridge, I was still one of the interesting posh people – I chain-smoked Sobranie Black Russians and recounted anecdotes about my aristocratic granny going on a cruise with T.S. Eliot. Management consultancy has turned me into boring posh. You know the type: they talk about how they had a nice avocado for lunch, for about twenty minutes at a time. Thanks to my milieu these days I talk about that and how to “maximize innovation clusters”. Yes, I’m depressed. Yes, I’m nostalgic. The saddest thing about Cambridge is that when you get to third year, you realise that you’re leaving soon, you need to get a job and that ideally that job should give you lots of money. You get tired of having to smoke roll-ups and needing to ask your parents for money to fund a decadent lifestyle that’s way beyond your means. So, consequently, you apply for the most boring, unnecessary excuse for a profession – management consultancy.

‘Unnecessary’ is really the operative word. There’s a very telling story – I’m not sure whether it’s apocryphal or not – about the late great Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the last of the Mitford sisters, who transformed Chatsworth House from an unaffordable relic of the days of vast aristocratic wealth into a rampantly successful business. Out of curiosity, she had a management consultant come up from London, and she said that basically after a few days at Chatsworth he gave her a file of paper telling her a smidgen of the huge amount she already knew about her business, and buggered off, pocketing a hefty fee for the privilege.

This is what I do pretty much every week. After three years at Cambridge pursuing the big questions of human existence in my work by day and having an excessively great time by night, I’m fannying around with spreadsheets and telling businesses to lay off workers and streamline their management structure. I am at the rotten core of capitalism.

I should have got that First and become a Marxist academic.