Belgravia

IF YOU have a soft spot for fancy historical dramas oozing with earls and countesses and jewellery and balls and gorgeous country houses, as in and should fill that lonely

then romantic void. Me, I could hardly suppress the yawns.

is authored by Lord Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, also the creator of the vastly popular TV series

But in this book there’s a great deal more “upstairs” than “downstairs”. What’s missing are the plain, but worthy ordinary characters (such as doughty cook Mrs Patmore) to provide a levelling influence on this rarified cutglass ensemble.

Almost all the characters in are identically snobbish, rich and keen on money, power and “breeding” (rather like the many horses they own). It was difficult to tell the aristocrats apart, and as for the servants, most of them are portrayed as venal, conniving and in for a fast buck or pathetically grateful for a lifetime’s security of grovelling servitude.

Fellowes’s latest novel is set in the post-Napoleonic Wars of Europe and is stuffed with earls and countesses and the odd useful merchant who might be a good sort if only he wasn’t in “trade”. God forbid anyone should actually do something to earn a living. It begins with the Duchess of Richmond’s “brilliant ball” in Brussels for the Duke of Wellington, about to give naughty Napoleon a damn good thrashing, but not before a bit of a battle in which some of the flowers of England (meaning the officers, not the ordinary foot soldiers) bite the dust.

From this eccentric scene comes a tangled tale of love, intrigue, illegitimacy, ambition and intrigue. It’s all rather claustrophobic and it becomes increasingly difficult to untangle the titled darlings and their entitled attitudes. There is a Lady Maria Grey, daughter of Lord and Lady (I forget), beautiful of course and quite feisty too, and the handsome but illborn Charles (or is he?) and the slightly sleazy Susan and the limp Oliver and in the end one just wonders why Darwin’s “survival of the fittest laws” seem to have excluded this lot. I rather liked the early seasons of

but largely because of the wonderfully acerbic Maggie Smith as the dowager countess, and the glorious beauty of the set (Highclere Castle). Unlike the exquisite BBC series which was both beautiful

was a bit of high and profound, jinks with jewels on top. left me feeling like Mark Twain, when he wrote about “Everytime I read I want to dig her (Jane Austen) up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” He took great delight in offending sensibilities by wondering why she’d been allowed to die a natural death rather than be executed for her literary crimes. My sentiments exactly: about and

except for the knotty drawback that I don’t believe in capital punishment.

Perhaps Lord Fellowes, who has managed to “trade” his first-hand knowledge of the rich and vacuous into piles of cash, should be sentenced to listening to his Conservative boss Theresa May sharing a platform on the merits of a “hard Brexit” with Nigel Farage, on an eternal loop.

Recommended to frustrated wives who join book clubs to drink and complain, and possibly Melania Trump, the living rebuke to those of us who fantasised the days of marrying someone just for their wealth and status were over. Silly us.