‘The rich are being attacked everywhere. We don’t have hoards in the bank – we have mortgages’

Down in the bowels of Broughton Sanctuary – eight miles from Skipton, North Yorkshire – is a framed newspaper cutting. Behind the glass, a photograph of a young boy and his father peers out below the headline: “The seven-year-old heir to 3,500 acres.”

That little boy is now 63-year-old Roger Tempest – businessman, father and squire of Broughton – the 32nd in his line since his family settled there in 1097.

By the time Roger was born, the elder of Henry and Janet Tempest’s two sons – with three older sisters – Broughton was run by his bachelor uncle, Stephen. When Stephen died suddenly in 1970, Broughton passed straight to Roger, but was run by Henry until his son came of age.

It was an appalling time to inherit anything. Not only were 65pc death duties levied on the estate, but Grade I-listed Broughton was too wet to catch fire.

Henry faced a nightmare, in every sense. As an officer in the Scots Guards, “he was shot in the head on his 21st birthday, having crossed the Rhine, and parachuted into places three weeks after the release of the concentration camps,” says Roger.

“Such deep trauma… I didn’t have a close relationship with him.”

But they were aligned on one thing: “That this place is worth keeping going. He struggled with it a lot, so I was brought up in that atmosphere, saying: ‘I’m going to bloody sort it out.’”