So where are the girls, old bean?

The Bullingdon is the club of choice for baby Tory grandees. Alumni include Boris Johnson, George Osborne, David Cameron and Alan Clark, the late Tory minister who boasted in his diaries of having sex with an unknown woman on a train and wrote that although Margaret Thatcher was “attractive”, he wouldn’t want to “jump on her”. Other famous members have included Edward VIII, Frederick IX of Denmark, the notable racist Cecil Rhodes, and David Dimbleby.

The Conservative connection is the reason why a sporting society dedicated to hunting and cricket, founded in the late 18th century and choosing its members from the most famous English public schools (Eton, Westminster, Harrow), has become the subject of the film, which stars some of Britain’s most gilded young actors.

Max Irons, the son of Jeremy Irons, plays Miles, the decent new boy trying to fit in with the Riot Club; Sam Claflin is superb as the monstrous Alistair Ryle, who is also being initiated. It is Ryle who triggers, during a Riot Club dinner in the private room of a rural pub, an appalling act of violence, which — metaphorically at least — rips the postwar consensus and dream of universal social mobility apart, and sets class against class.

One member of the club, keen to look manful in front of his fellows, hires a prostitute to put “under the table”, like a dog. You can guess why

Ryle does not have “daddy issues” so much as great-great-grandaddy issues: he lives under the cloud of his ancestors’ influence. It is amusing that Irons — and also Freddie Fox, son of the actor Edward Fox, who plays the Riot Club president — appear in a satirical film about the perils of inherited wealth; but who doesn’t love irony?

The Bullingdon, and hence the Riot Club, is for rich and/or posh men only. It is a surviving, if absurd fragment of the old Establishment, where men controlled everything and women were either ornaments or sluts. It took a new generation of creative women to skewer its folly on screen.

Wade, a gifted middle-class girl who grew up in Sheffield, was educated at Bristol University and is a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme. The film’s Danish director, Lone Scherfig, was also responsible for An Education, another absorbing film about the nuances of class, based on the memoirs of the writer Lynn Barber, who now works for The Sunday Times.

The film concentrates on the Riot Club’s relationships with women. There may be a mass of men in tail coats on the screen, speaking in barely disguised plummy terror, but it takes the women to give them colour and shadow. There is Lauren (Holliday Grainger), Miles’s working-class girlfriend, who is also studying at Oxford University. There is Rachel, the daughter of the local pub landlord, who is a waitress at the club — a job that requires the complex skills of a psychiatric nurse. She is played by Jessica Brown Findlay, of Downton Abbey. Finally, and most interestingly, there is an escort girl called Charlie, played by Natalie Dormer, star of The Tudors, Game of Thrones and the forthcoming instalment of The Hunger Games.

I meet Dormer to discuss The Riot Club at a museum in east London. She is fascinating to look at — she seems to be all edges. Dormer is a middle-class girl from Reading, a former bluestocking who missed Cambridge by a grade. She was intrigued by the premise of the film because she loved the theme — class — and that it was directed and written by women.

Her role is this: one member of the club, keen to look manful in front of his fellows, hires a prostitute to put “under the table”, like a dog. You can guess why. Dormer’s character refuses their request, calmly; she never does more than two clients without a break, she says, and she never does anything off the books. (I liked this conceit — the fact that the characters, despite their excellent schooling, are too stupid to hire the right kind of prostitute. It exposes the unworldliness they are most desperate to conceal.)

The Riot Club members offer Charlie more money. She says no. But you’re just a whore, says one; why can’t you do what we want? Don’t you know who we are? Actually, she doesn’t. She leaves; the Riot Club are thwarted. “She cuts them down,” says Dormer, She speaks to me in character, a robot explaining something simple to a fool, yet in the language of capitalism, which can be understood very clearly. “That’s not my job. There are women who provide that service. I do not provide that service. There is a stand-off.” Which Charlie wins, easily, even though the Riot Club have a sword — and a wig — to play with. These, I think, are to conjure the 18th-century figure Lord Ryott, whom the club was founded to honour.

“It’s about entitlement,” says Dormer, “and in this case, misogyny. Explicit misogyny.” I ask her — do the men in The Riot Club hate women? “Yes,” she says, “or they are terrified of them, which can be one and the same thing.”

Touch of class warfare: the Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer plays a feisty escort girl in The Riot Club (Benni Valsson)

Freddie Fox told Dormer he found it very chilling to play a man like this; she thinks it was essential that the director was female. “I think [the film] would have been a very different beast if it had been directed by a man. It’s hard for an audience to engage with anti-heroes but you have to, or you lose your audience. You don’t lose the empathy until the very last moment; it is surreptitiously seeping through your hands.

“Charlie knows innately that these boys are scared of women,” Dormer adds. “You get violent with things you are scared of and don’t fully understand. It’s a power struggle. Abuse and oppress something before it becomes clear you feel threatened or could be hurt by it. She knows that they probably all come from single-sex public schools and are repressed.”

Alan Clark said that Eton, which is a typical nursery for the Bullingdon Club, was “an early introduction to human cruelty, treachery and extreme physical hardship”. Dormer continues: “They [the Riot Club] have limited knowledge of the ‘real world’ and a disgusting sense of entitlement that comes from their privileged backgrounds, which is dangerously heightened by alcohol. But they are not all ‘bad eggs’.”

This is true: the kindest club member, who drinks with his tenants on his estate and likes them, is told by the monstrous Ryle that, actually, the tenants “hate you”. The farmer-lord, who enjoys chatting to the proles about tractors, looks genuinely heartbroken.

Dormer adds: “Charlie understands it’s the mob mentality that is dangerous. We are only a thin veneer away from Bedlam.”

A Riot Club member says in the play that there are “girls for now and girls for later”. When I was at Oxford University, my husband says, someone used this very phrase about me. I was apparently “a girl for now”, which is probably better than being “a girl for later”, if your “later” is a lifetime with a sub-Bullingdon cartoon. In The Riot Club, Lauren — also a girl for now — is offered £27,000 (the exact price of three years of tuition at Oxford) to provide the same service that Charlie refused to. She, too, refuses; in truth, these boys aren’t good at asking nicely. They are not paying for intimacy; there is no intimacy under a table with 10 men dressed as footmen. They are paying for dominion. She, too, escapes sexual activity; as does the waitress, Rachel. They harm her in another way.

Is The Riot Club mere satire, or does it have bones of truth? When I was at Oxford the Bullingdon set kept away from those not their own, and that included Jewish girls from the suburbs of London. They were spending time at their country houses, or with each other, and they didn’t interest us anyway. The young are only interested in themselves, and it is a rare teenager at an elite institution who analyses that elitism intellectually or critically. The university certainly didn’t encourage it. Oxford is too busy gilding its own myth to focus on the myth of a small undergraduate dining club.

I did know that Oxford was a place of ancient and perhaps unconscious misogyny, even if it has been admitting women as students for years. I remember how a boyfriend gave me a black eye on college property. The police were not called to charge him with assault — it was not even considered. You can assume there is a casual misogyny about the politics of at least some Bullingdon members, because the Establishment to which they aspire practises this misogyny.

When I was at Oxford, my husband says, someone used this very phrase about me. I was apparently “a girl for now”

You can inspect the policies of the current government, whose two most senior members were also members of the Bullingdon Club. Their politics have not favoured women. Or you can just examine their behaviour when they are “joking”. “Calm down, dear,” the prime minister said to the Labour MP Angela Eagle in the House of Commons in 2011. That same year, he told his own backbench MP Nadine Dorries that he knew she was “frustrated”, to vicious laughter.

Dorries wreaked a terrible revenge when she later called him and Osborne “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk [and] who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others” — was she talking about the Bullingdon Club?

The satire, I think, is partially true. As I wrote this piece, I contacted a woman who claimed to have provided prostitutes for Bullingdon Club parties at private houses in the early 1990s. She was unwilling to speak on the record but told me that, on one occasion, a club member initially refused to pay the agreed fee. This is baffling, if true, when you consider how wealthy the members are, until you remember that using prostitutes is rarely about sex. It is, as I said, about dominion and fear of intimacy. It is on the record that Osborne, at least, has met a prostitute, although it seemed that he simply befriended her, which is not an immoral thing to do — don’t Tories love small businesses?

There is more anecdotal evidence about the Bullingdon and women from the dreadful Alan Clark. He, I think, hated women. He married a 16-year-old girl, Jane, when he was 31, and was never faithful to her; she was, he said, “the perfect victim”. He famously bedded a woman and both her daughters; he once said “girls have to be succulent, and that means under 25”.

Jane Clark was so conditioned to her husband’s behaviour that she blamed the women — or more specifically their class — in a line that Wade could have written: “If you bed people of below-stairs class, they will go to the papers.”

I do not mean to say that all Bullingdon Club members are raging adulterers, narcissists and users of prostitutes. More usually, members marry wealthy women and settle into a life of luxurious influence. They most often end up as bankers. At Oxford today, I was told, members of the Bullingdon are simply laughed at; when the film is released, they will surely cower in their rooms. Most of what is written about them — including the Riot Club — is satire, blown up into monstrousness, although the tail coats are right. The truth is probably less fascinating.

Spire brigade: Holliday Grainger as the working-class student Lauren, with well-heeled boyfriend Miles (Max Irons)

The Riot Club is released in cinemas nationwide on September 19