Is Britain finally starting to get over its embarrassing crush on posh boys? The Bullingdon Club, the 200-year-old, male-only club reserved for the aristocracy and the very wealthy, has been shunned by the Oxford University Conservative Association. It has been added to OUCA’s proscribed list, having “no place in the modern party”. While past members include David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne, people recently invited to join the Bullingdon have been turning it down, those who join are branded “losers” and, in 2016, it was said to be on the brink of closure for lack of members.

It feels as though I should do something to mark the end of a truly heavenly era – throw bread rolls around a restaurant, intimidate waiting staff, burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person – all from that repertoire of jolly Bullingdon japes you’d hear about. While I never understood how these things were amusing, that’s only because I’m dead common. State-educated common. Council house-bred common. So common, that if any Bullingdon boy had crossed my path, they might have tried to shag me for a bet. I’m simply not cultivated enough to comprehend the joy of trashing a restaurant and then, with gentlemanly elan, leaving a cheque to cover the damage. That’s class for you, innit? Or is it? Some people might say that it was Magaluf for toffs.

This probably means that we won’t get to see that bewitching photograph any more – you know, of Cameron, Johnson and their mates, looking “born to rule” in their Bullingdon finery, the one that resembles a Brideshead Revisited/Clockwork Orange mashup. Though you can’t see it anyway. It was hastily banned from publication by the Oxford photographers who owned it, around the time when – hang on, let me think – ah yes, when Cameron was gearing up to become “Dave”, the relatable/down-to-earth Conservative party leader, going on to become prime minister, leading a coalition government, with a cabinet stuffed with… old Etonians and multimillionaires.

When Boris met Dave: from Bullingdon to Brexit – in pictures Read more

There lies the rub. In some ways, it’s a shame that the Bullingdon is on the wane. (It was convenient having them all herded into one place, where you could keep an eye on them.) And who really cares if some drunken idiots want to pathetically boast about Daddy’s fortune at tragic student dinners?

It didn’t even matter that such people felt entitled to power. The only thing that ever matters is when the electorate buys into the forelock-tugging, better-than-us nonsense. The cabinet is hardly full of ordinary folk now, but political fashions come and go and, right now, it feels encouragingly as though the British have had their fill of the Bullingdon-style, toff-supremacist attitude. In recent times, it seems to have gone beyond Boris fatigue to the point where even Boris fatigue is fatigued. While the OUCA has decided the attitude that Bullingdon represents has no place in its modern party, perhaps it should never have had a place in modern British governance at all.

• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist