Earl Spencer has shone a light into the toxic world of the sick British upper crust

THE film Saltburn described an aristocratic family in an exquisite home being destroyed by a middle-class demon.

- Tanya Gold

How pitiful he was, we thought, to hate such gilded creatures. But they should have looked closer to home.

Lord Spencer has published a memoir - A Very Private School - which tells how he was abused at his prep school. It is a brave thing to do and it is clearly an act of survival. I wonder if he told his parents. I wonder if he told his sister, Princess Diana, who shared the childhood in which their mother Frances left her abusive husband and, due to the testimony of their snobbish grandmother, was denied custody of her children. Spencer says the abuse by a young matron destroyed his early relationships in life- and it destroyed his childhood. Groomed by a female paedophile, he wanted full sex at 12.

Unlike most things in Britain abuse has no class - it is upwardly and downwardly mobile. But it was only the aristocracy that, until this generation at least, sent its male children away, usually at eight, to be brutalised by people who hated them.

That's your Saltburn demon. He wasn't in the house but the school, and he wasn't a friend but a carer. Thousands of men were emotionally destroyed by an experience which, in the wider culture, is still imbued with the glamour of wealth. Blame Brideshead Revisited, though no one came out of that story happy. We just misremember it.