The new Jaguar XF: more Bourne than Bond, stealthy and invisible in a crowd but with the right skills to call upon

“I am a young executive. My habit is to brag. I use a slimline tablet. And I drive an XF Jag”.

The words of poet John Betjeman, whose subject in the 1974 poem Executive actually had to make do with borrowing his firm’s Cortina. The latest generation of Jaguar XF is, however, surely a very 21st century kind of saloon.

Certainly, like its predecessor, it’s won many a gong, not least Germany’s prestigious Golden Steering Wheel award – the kind of thing Saudi princes possibly have for real – and the Saloon of the Year as awarded by the troubled Top Gear British entertainment brand.

You can see why they might like it. Without being obviously beefy, it is, like the Jaguar brand, a vehicle that’s very blokey. It’s the kind of car that the owner might chat about with enthusiasm to their wife’s best friend’s husband over a pint of ale; the kind of car that, like the Jaguar Mk II of old, would be an excellent candidate for a new archetypal getaway car for TV villains planning an audacious bank job.

In fact saloon – a word that these days sounds as old-fashioned applied to bars as cars – is rather too genteel to describe the Jaguar XF, especially the latest, top-of-the-range 3-litre R Sport model, yours for HK$516,000. Stealth would be more apt.

From the outside, the XF initially looks rather anonymous. Driven slowly, it could pass for a ho-hummish family car, with its impressive petrol economy, capacious boot, safety features (when my groceries shifted on the passenger seat, the car became very insistent that they put on their seat belt) and excess legroom; although shorter and lower than the original XF of 2007, the XF is considerably roomier inside.