If he can detach academic excellence from the national obsession with poshness, he will be remembered as a revolutionary.
He is not a drawling toff. His is a brisk, self-confident form of poshness: think of a young officer in one of the smarter regiments, getting on with the job in some global hotspot.
Some such thinkers blame the "Downton Abbey syndrome", that is, the perverse attraction of the trappings of poshness for the downtrodden victims of capitalist excess.
