I can’t blame Pippa for her latest career move

I suppose we might all be quite wrong about what it’s like to be Pippa Middleton. I suppose that’s perfectly possible. When Hugh Laurie wrote his novel The Gun Seller, I remember being told he submitted it under a pseudonym, so terrified was he that a grasping publisher might be willing to publish any old crap provided it had the name of Stephen Fry’s mate on it. With Pippa, for all we know, the situation might be similar.

‘Great news!’ one soulless publishing automaton may have said to another. ‘Some complete nobody has sent in a manuscript about how to host godawful jamborees for men in blazers and women in Alice bands, of the exact sort that our doomed, benighted industry has been desperate to spunk up to half a million quid on, simply because we reckon it’s a curiously untapped market!’ And perhaps only then, once a lunch was fixed up, and once this mysterious author had stood up between courses, and perhaps turned around to go to the loo, did this lucky publisher say, ‘Hang on.