Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.

In London - and forget those extra public pressures on politicians - the lovely old Sloane world of manor houses simply hasn't cut it since Big Bang in 1986, the point at which Mrs. Thatcher really started to achieve her ambition to make this country more like America - its ambition, economy, it's very tangible measures of success.

Marmite - like that other little black-jar job, Bovril - is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.

By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time.

It just doesn't mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.

Now, I don't mind making fun of those preachers who steal money from people, they kind of deserve it.

We were far from rich, but I never remember my parents worrying about money.

At heart, Pearson is in the intellectual property business, be it through publishing books or the 'Financial Times'.