The concerns of this column are more than usually nobby today – and you don’t come much nobbier than James Douglas-Hamilton. Younger son of the Duke of Hamilton – to visit whom Rudolf Hess made his ill-fated wartime flight – he was born Lord James Douglas-Hamilton and later became the Earl of Selkirk before renouncing the peerage to remain an MP and thereby protect John Major’s slender Tory majority. A year later, when Major was defeated, the retiring prime minister returned Douglas-Hamilton to the Lords as a life peer. A lucky chap – in other circumstances, he would almost certainly have been removed from the Upper House in Labour’s cull of ‘hereditories’.

All this is amusingly recounted in his recently published memoir, After You, Prime Minister (Stacey International, £14.95), which, besides his political life, also deals with his childhood (a young page at Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation), boxing prowess at Eton College, his success in the Oxford Union while a undergraduate at Balliol and the Hess business mentioned earlier.

As his pal Sir Malcolm Rifkind says in his foreword, he has a habit of landing on his feet. Description of his successes and the upper-class milieu in which he has always moved does, however, give the book a flavour – rather a welcome flavour, I found – of Mary Dunn’s 1930s comedy classic, the spoof memoir Lady Addle Remembers.

Take, for instance, this passage concerning his mother, a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, granddaughter of the Duke of Gordon and sister-in-law of the Duke of Sutherland (phew!). On the death of a friend’s mum, Lord S. reports, mater wrote to him to say: “I so much hope that your mother moved and touched and changed your life as my mother did for me.” Years later, the friend told him: “Reading those immensely consoling words, I remembered again all the good my mother had done and was glad.”

Lady A. could not have put it better.

Final point: I notice that early in the book Lord Selkirk uses the word 'toilet' where others of his class would always have said 'lavatory'. Is this once quintessentially Non-U word now OK?