The most sensational allegations are already well-rehearsed. Charles seemed “giddily elated” after Diana’s death; that Diana said the now-King was “in love with his valet”, and that His Maj said after her death that “we’ll forget her soon enough”. Wasn’t it a bit dodgy to make all these un-falsifiable claims so long after the fact? Laura Kuenssberg asked ever so mildly, in a BBC interview on Sunday. Shouldn’t the good earl consider Harry and Wills before raking it all over?

Spencer’s retort cuts to the heart of Britain’s posho pathology. No, he insisted, it’s all a true account of what he remembers. Charles was always on about duty, he said, but Diana also had a strong sense of duty. And as “a witness to history”, the Earl intoned, he has a “duty” to tell his sister’s story.

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But what exactly do we mean here, by duty? Duty to whom, or to what? Over Britain’s high imperial era, this idea of “duty” always pulled in two directions. One half of the ruling-class culture that emerged in that age was a Spartan toughness and (at times) cold-blooded single-mindedness, that built institutions and infrastructure, and also extracted wealth or massacred recalcitrant natives. Institutionalized and reproduced in Britain’s chilly, disciplinarian public schools, this sense of “duty” supplied the former Empire’s stoical, institutional-building team spirit and capacity to set personal feelings aside in pursuit of larger goals.

The other half was a genuinely idealistic moral universalism. Born in industrial-age Britain’s Protestant predilection for social reform, and always more female-coded, this supplied a core of righteous zeal that animated the Empire’s missionaries and “civilizers”. Perhaps the most historically notable fusion of these two senses of “duty” is the point where (admittedly after a lot of campaigning) abolishing chattel slavery became imperial policy, realized through an immense expenditure of blood and treasure.

The British Empire’s legacy is immense and ambivalent, meriting both the acclaim of its nostalgists and also the critique of its post-colonial revisionists. And since its end, no subset of Britons has been left more lost, and less capable of reckoning with that legacy, than the upper class — especially the constitutional monarchy — whose purpose evaporated with its collapse.

It was not always thus. In the high imperial 19th century, our monarchs did their duty, just as they expected citizens to do the same. Prince Albert turned his abilities to diplomacy and or institution-building in areas such as museums, scientific societies, and military schools. Queen Victoria, for her part, espoused moral causes such as animal welfare, social reform, and injured veterans. Some monarchs and a whole empire later, even Charles’s mother was able to squeeze a lifetime’s “duty” from presiding over the Empire’s dismemberment while pretending everything was fine. But there was nothing left on that carcass by the time Her Maj died. So with little useful to occupy them, our upper crust has turned the twin moral turbine of their imperial upbringing loose on themselves, and all of us, to disastrous effect.

Nowhere did this appear in more vivid tableau vivant, than throughout the miserable marriage of Charles and Diana. Victoria’s and Albert’s instincts are discernible in, for example, Charles’s interest in youth education and Diana’s in landmine victims. Charles tried to personify “duty” in the sense of willingness to inhabit given roles, rules, and obligations, irrespective of personal feelings. And Diana personified “duty” in the sense of obligation to pursue a deeply felt moral mission wherever it led.

But unlike Victoria and Albert, Charles and Diana had only a Potemkin empire in which to play out their inherited roles: the “Commonwealth”. This entity, confected to save face as the real Empire imploded, was always an awkward hybrid of friendly-ish settler states such as Australia, plus former colonies whose disposition toward the Crown runs from ambivalent to openly and extractively hostile.

With only an at best ambivalent reception to enjoy, while doing the rounds in the “Commonwealth”, Charles’s and Diana’s institution-building and moral-reform instincts went in search of a canvas at sufficient scale. Alas: they found themselves reborn as warring emotional camps, in an America-led, globalized 24-hour TV entertainment cycle. In this frenzied setting, a sensibility that once ruled the world degraded into an ugly divorce battle, between “duty” in Charles’s sense of subsuming your feelings for the greater good, and Diana’s of pursuing personal truth, no matter what the cost.

This resonated more widely than just the Windsors, because the battle was also raging throughout our erstwhile imperial class. Long before Diana died, her combination of idealism and selfishness was a sufficiently common cultural hangover of the Sixties to have been vividly satirized in the Nineties sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.

The show’s two central characters, Patsy and Eddie, capture the hedonism and sentimental, self-righteous attitude this produced — while casting a sharp eye at Britain’s fraying upper class. Only Patsy is genuinely “posh”, but she also has no money: she lives a parasitic life in nouveau riche Eddie’s house, where she guzzles Eddie’s champagne, makes use of her chauffeur, and bullies her staid daughter, while weeping crocodile tears whenever challenged.

The year after Ab Fab stopped broadcasting, Diana’s sudden death declared her self-involved version of “duty” the winner in the media battle, as it were by martyrdom and canonization. As Tony Blair solemnly declared at the time, she was the “People’s Princess”. From there on in, the Patsy and Eddie version of “authenticity” was to be the new normal for Modern Britain. Small wonder, perhaps, that therapeutic navel-gazing plus globalized wokeness has since become the dominant moral registers for what’s left of Britain’s poshos, as typified by figures such as Kirstie Alsopp and indeed Diana’s son, Harry.

Watching Earl Spencer justify his latest salvos against King Charles to Laura Kuenssberg, I don’t doubt his assertion that if he really wanted to spill the tea, there are spicier truth-bombs he could drop. But clearly he doesn’t just want to screw King Charles. He wants us to understand how discreet he’s being and how utterly lovely his life is, and to be sympathetic about his (self-diagnosed) “ADHD” and “rejection-sensitive dysphoria”. Like Patsy and Eddie, he wants to destroy his enemies and not be made to feel guilty and still have everyone agree that he’s a really nice person.

What of the other side, meanwhile? If Britain’s posho moral-reform instincts have long since resiled into wokeness, philandering, and crybully emotional terrorism, the proponents of emotionally detached team spirit are just as gravely adrift. Shorn of an empire in which to act globally, and obviously reluctant to contract their field of vision to “little Britain”, this group has instead directed its energies either to renting out social cachet à la Patsy, selling off the family silver, or alternatively chasing a dream of universal institution-building, often at the expense of those whose interests they ought to protect.

Here, for example, we find hereditary products of Britain’s erstwhile imperial class such as Boris Johnson, opening Britain’s borders to the “Boriswave”. We find Jacob Rees-Mogg enjoining British plebs (presumably excluding himself) to “do their duty” and enlist to defend their nation, even as those plebs witness government after government refusing to defend Britain’s own coastline in the name of “international law”. And, indeed, we find the recent, cold-blooded assertion by Rory Stewart that the mass rape of British girls by Pakistani-heritage clan mafia networks is a trivial issue compared to real problems, such as the future of AI governance. We also find King Charles hiding in grand thoughts about our technological future: his reaction to Earl Spencer’s revelations was to attend a conference on AI. An aide retorted, in response to press enquiries, that “The King was rather more concerned about the future of mankind than the unkind claims of one man picking at the scars of the past.”

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These two poles represent, between them, the spread of ways a decadent upper class can absolve itself of responsibility. On the one side, by resiling into Patsy and Eddie emotivism, and saying, of anything inconvenient or guilt-inducing: “It wasn’t my fault because I’m nice and a victim.” On the other, by fixating on “the future of mankind” rather than of a particular people, and offloading responsibility to assorted forms of technocracy, from institutions, to international laws, and – now – the dream of a “machine intelligence” that might finally liberate them from decisions and accountability.

A fish rots from the head down. Ordinary Brits are still demonstrably capable of self-organizing in a crisis, for the common good, at a pragmatic scale. If our country is in a bad way, ultimate responsibility lies with our leadership class, which long since committed itself to a general stance of “it’s not my fault”, or “we need to make things even more neutral”. Whether the supposed culprit is personal trauma, institutional racism, Donald Trump, International Law, or AI Swarm Gods, we’re stuck with this ghastly tranche of wet-eyed cry-bullies and cold-blooded universalists, none of whom shows the slightest interest in the one thing they’re supposed to do: lead and serve, in the interests of their own nation.

By contrast with the normal Brits who still cheerfully rally in a crisis, they should all feel ashamed of their own cowardice and crapulence. But they won’t. Shame implies choice, which signals responsibility. And the inability of the class that produces characters such as Earl Spencer, Boris Johnson, and Rory Stewart to feel shame, let alone take responsibility, is precisely the problem we need to confront, if we’re ever to climb out of our current morass.

It’s not really possible to do without an elite. But we really could do without one whose sole unifying refrain is “It’s not my fault”. So my fervent wish, at this point, is that “swan song” refers not just to Earl Spencer, or Diana, or even King Charles (A)III, but all of them: their whole class, generation, and hopelessly decadent worldview.

These, at least, are just some of the suggestions offered by the various ‘classy/trashy’ listicle memes that have periodically surfaced on social media ever since the New Zealand columnist Ana Samways sought advice on the subject from Twitter in 2016. One conclusion might be that the rich and the poor are unexpectedly similar, at least when it comes to their preferred pursuits (indiscriminate shagging, boozing, lazing about), the only difference being how these indulgences are regarded by society.

There will of course be local variations to this. I’m no expert on the codes that dictate class (or lack thereof) in the smarter post-codes of Wellington, NZ, but the idea does echo a concept long familiar in the British media, that the upper classes and the lower classes have a good deal common when it comes to knowing how to have a good time, largely because they aren’t hobbled by the guilt and social ambition that besets the middle classes, for whom fun is never the point.

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I’ve even witnessed this trope in real life, in my very own sitting room. My father was a working-class boy from Bromley who left school at 14 to take up a hairdressing apprenticeship at a Mayfair salon. He was good looking and good with an up-do. He rose fast, and always said that being hairdresser meant that he could get on with anyone “from a dustman to a duke”; but it wasn’t the dustmen who turned him on to drugs in the 1970s, it was the posh kids he met at clubs like Sybilla’s and the Aretusa.

Dad started taking heroin, and then he started selling it. To aristocrats. By the time he was in his mid-thirties and I was not yet ten the hairdressing wasn’t going so well (junkies and day-jobs don’t mix) so the dealing was paying the bills. Which meant every night Chelsea’s loucher denizens would find their way across the river to our mansion flat in Battersea to buy drugs, while I performed ancillary services like refilling wineglasses and so on. The denizens usually couldn’t be bothered to go back home to sample their purchases, so stayed at ours, sometimes all night. I would often find a stoned marquess passed out on the carpet when I got up for my morning Rice Krispies (scooped direct from the packet into my mouth).

They seemed to have so much in common, my dad and these men who had been educated at Eton and would one day inherit castles. They dressed the same, liked the same music, could stay up all night chatting. We were even invited to Jamie Blandford’s wedding at Blenheim Castle. So classy! (For us at least, probably quite trashy that the future Duke of Marlborough invited his dealer, and his dealer’s daughter, to his wedding).

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My dad may have been a drug-dealing hairdresser, and my mum an alcoholic model from Wanstead, but I got in to a posh school, followed by a posh university, which led ultimately to a posh job, as deputy editor of Tatler where I got to witness, first hand the way these posh/not posh lists are created by the publications that position themselves as the ultimate arbiter of such things. There is no science to these lists, no research, they are made up. I remember one amusing Christmas features meeting in which we brain-stormed the list of the poshest baby names for 2017. The aim was to make them absurd as possible — Quail, Ra, Gethsemene, Npeter (with a silent n) — but also to include a few ‘normal’ names — David, John, Kenneth — for the veneer of veracity. The joke was on the people who took these lists seriously.

Because it’s all just banter, isn’t it, this taxonomy of rich/poor, classy/trashy, posh/not. The genre finds its acme in Nicky Haslam and his ‘Common Crimes’ tea-towel. Most of the things Haslam finds common are things that most people (in their stolid middle-class befuddlement) might think were posh — Farrow and Ball, Henley, knighthoods and sorbet. The snobbish reverse logic is the point. Things that were posh are now common because the mercurial posh people have now moved on, and you will never be able to keep up. You don’t find this funny? How dull.

These codifications of rich and poor, masquerading as harmless fun, on social media, in magazines, on tea-towels, serve only to reaffirm the privilege of the privileged. Classy/trashy tells us that even the shoddiest behaviour looks glittery with enough cash and the poor can’t get away with anything. Posh/not posh lists only serve to maintain the line separating the upper classes from all the other classes. And the idea that uppers and lowers have so much in common is ridiculous. My dad always knew that the relationship he had with the landed junkies was transactional, he always knew his place, as did they. And their parents never had to sell cocaine to pay the school fees.

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That is not to say that culture cannot say something interesting about class. When I was growing up my favourite film was Trading Places, in which two mean millionaire grandpas try to resolve a dispute about the differences/similarities between the rich and the poor. They did this by switching the lives of a Wasp banker and a street hustler. Humanity wins the bet and the characters who occupy the moral high ground are a butler and a prostitute.

In my twenties the song Common People by Pulp offered a brilliantly elegant narrative appraisal of the transactional relationship between the classes, and of how things look so very different depending on your perspective. It is all too easy for the upper classes to make tourist forays into the lives of the lower classes, and jump to assumptions about their similarities, but the fundamental difference is that for the loaded girl in the cockroach-infested flat, it’s all a game, which she can step out of at any moment.

In The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst meticulously observes the opaque sign-postings of privilege; how in certain worlds every choice you make — furnishings, food, phrases — advertises whether you belong or not, and how impossible it is to get it right if you are not already accepted. The moralities in the book are muddy, but that is a truer reflection of real life than the binary lists that currently populate culture.

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We no longer live in a time of high social mobility. What made the difference to my life was education. After my dad went bankrupt and left my mum for a girl my own age, I was offered an assisted place so I could stay at my school and do my A-levels. Assisted places were abolished by Tony Blair’s government in 1997. When I went to Cambridge I did not have to pay fees, because these would not be introduced until 1998; and I was eligible for a maintenance grant from my local council, which were abolished in 1999, reintroduced in 2006 and abolished again in 2015. I left university with a very small amount of debt, which allowed me to take unpaid internships, and ultimately get a job in the industry that I was interested in. The experience of graduates who do not come from wealthy backgrounds today is very different.

But this is not just about someone like me being able to study classics at Cambridge, or about getting a job in an industry that is difficult to access without the right credentials and contacts. There are more fundamental issues at stake. The decrease in social mobility is illustrated by growing health inequalities — in the least-deprived areas a person can expect to live 19 years longer than someone in the most deprived areas. And this is a situation that the Covid-19 pandemic is making more perilous. Those gaps that people on the edge of their economic capacity can fall through are getting wider and wider.

Let’s not make this all seem OK by reducing disadvantage to a pithy listicle. We need to remember that these are individuals and not just cultural clichés. We need to care about inequality and not just laugh it off.