Taki is right: we are all still snobs

I was recently upbraided in this magazine by your High Life columnist, a person I’ve liked and admired for many years, regarding a piece I’d written for Tatler on the ski resort of Gstaad. Taki can sometimes get painfully close to the bone, but he let me off lightly. His point was that I hadn’t understood what made the place tick because only the new-money arrivistes had spoken, as opposed to the chic old lot who had run for the hills. This was an interesting point. I’d assumed that we, not just as a nation but as human beings, had grown out of or at least softened our attitude to snobbery. I thought that we had stopped instinctively revering the old and rubbishing the new. As it turns out I’d been as stupid as David Cameron believing that his goal of a classless Britain was remotely achievable. How could I have been so naive?

The idea for the Gstaad piece came from a colleague who had been a guest in one of the resort’s swankier chalets at Christmas.