A gift for name-dropping also helps. Essential too – as the current breed of Nigellas and Pollys proves – are righteousness and shameless self-satisfaction. To all of the world’s problems, the answer is: “Do it my way”.

Today Lynda Lee-Potter shines like the Christmas fairy from the top of the Daily Mail tree. She illuminates and personifies the values of her proprietors, leading but never contradicting all they hold dear. She is both proud of being working-class and triumphant for having risen out of it, for what is snobbery but the entrepreneurial spirit? Class, she argues, will live forever, which is good news for without it we would lack social aspiration.

Candidly she describes her ascent, thanks to winning a grammar school place and changing her accent. Not that she despises her humble origins. She wrings a lot of mileage from the washing strung up on pulleys in the living room, the milk collected in jugs from a van in the street and the loo in the garden with, as loo paper, the News Chronicle cut in squares. Gratefully she thanks her grandfather “who worked down the pit all his life” for teaching her about the equality of man and the need to treat all people with respect. “You’re as good as the Queen”, he informed her.

But equality is no substitute for ambition. A determined mother (“Like me, my mother had a fundamentally ruthless streak”) made very clear that certain lower-class failings had to be overcome if the desired social mobility were to be achieved. On the morning of Lynda’s posh wedding, her mother slipped a sedative into the old man’s tea. He slept through the ceremony, which went off without a hitch, thus enabling his grand-daughter to rise to the social position from which she can now write: “Luckily, my husband comes from a family where the furniture and silver is inherited”.

This book offers itself not as autobiography but rather as a how-to-do-it on beating the British class system. But does class still exist? In these egalitarian days Etonians speak Estuary English and the second-in-line to the throne scrubs toilets. Lee-Potter insists that it does, yet many of her examples hark back to yesteryear, to the days of “Jennifer’s Diary”. There cannot be many among today’s young readers familiar with Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, the former model Bronwen Pugh or royal couturier Hardy Amies.

Many of the moral judgements also are anachronistic: “Upper-middle-class mummies have little trouble with au pairs because they are naturally authoritative”. “The pronunciation of upper-class names is a minefield”. “The lower middle-classes desperately want to be dainty”. Really? Are there people who still pretend to have grown up in a much grander house than they did? Or who say with a smirk about a colleague “MPSIA”, meaning “Minor public school, I’m afraid”? Or sneer at tinned salmon and Black Forest gateau?

Spot on, however, as timely as the Mail front-page, is the author’s hatred of scroungers. “The only people who hanker after a classless society are those who want what other people have without working for it. We are not all equal or prepared to put in the same amount of effort, so we don’t deserve the same rewards”. Divertingly for her readers, Lee-Potter finds these layabouts even among the Royal Family. (Like the rest of the tabloids, she is turning against the royals; only the Queen escapes scorn.)

From her weathered pedestal, Lee-Potter does drop tantalising bits of useful insider information. Apparently it is much smarter to have a double-barrelled name without a hyphen (like Parker Bowles). Her own carries the offending orthographical mark only because it was inserted by accident on her husband’s birth certificate. Bravely she puts her own “Lynda” on the list of “Naff” first names, along with such others as Rita, Sharon, and Beryl which she cruelly reveals is Bel Mooney’s real name. (Somehow she omits “Brenda”, which readers of Private Eye will know is the essence of “Naff”.)

Change

Lee-Potter sets out to prove that “like class, snobbery will always be with us" and that it is no bad thing. “It has certainly motivated me all my life. I may be ridiculous but I don’t care.” However, what this, her first book, proves is how hard it is for a seasoned journalist to go over 2,000 words. The short paragraphs roll out, flat declarative sentence after flat declarative sentence, larded with anecdotes from the cuttings: “Actor Tom Courtenay, who was born in Hessle Road near the Hull dockyards...”; “‘You can tell a gentleman by his shoes,’ said one-time hooker Monica Coghlan”.

Short chapters are extended at the end with insipid questionnaires (“Are You Posh?” involves asking yourself “Do you stay with Lord and Lady Vestey for the Cheltenham Jumping Festival?”) – and with dull lists. Ten “Naff Holidays” unsurprisingly include Disneyland; “Naff Hobbies”, Bowls: hardly in the eagle-eyed Nancy Mitford class.

At the very end of the book the foul undercurrent of nastiness that underlies snobbery comes to the surface. In her finale, as an example of the opposite of successes like herself, Lee-Potter cites the failure of John Morgan, the Times’s “Modern Manners” columnist found dead at the bottom of an airwell in The Albany last year. The coroner declined to give a verdict of suicide. But Lee-Potter has no doubt: “You can live a life very different from your past as long as you are not trying to pretend the old one never existed. Fooling ourselves is the real danger.”

Indeed. Lee-Potter is too experienced a journalist and interviewer to give herself such an easy ride. She ought to venture an honest memoir of the kind now selling well. She could reveal more – perhaps the secret of a long happy marriage or of how to deliver three children to the journalist’s trade. She should avoid those women’s-mag, 10-point lists just as she avoids egg-and-chips and pineapple chunks. In a writer, intolerance is far more excusable than padding, and there is obviously more to be said about that mother-in-law.