I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Not quite, anyway. I was born arse-first into an NHS hospital, weighing seven pounds and more yellow than an alcoholic in banana pyjamas. It wasn’t the golden glow of good breeding; it was jaundice.

You see, I am part of that lower middle class contingent that drinks Earl Grey tea with milk, listens to Radio 4 while cleaning the toilet and quotes GCSE Keats badly at dinner parties. I’m about as posh as HobNob biscuits; half chocolate-covered snob, half oat-chipped inverse-snob, which makes me perfectly positioned to point out our current class conundrum.

The morning our brave and stupid Chancellor George Osborne announced the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, a number of people posted up his infamous Bullingdon Club photo on Twitter. “Whatever happens today, remember this photo,” declared one comedian. It was time, Twitter implied, for those public school boys to show their true colours. For the elite to delete. For the posh to push.

For this, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a cabinet of absolute rambunctious poshos. Real whizzbanging members of the aristocracy. Absolute ruddy Etonians, fossicking great chumleys and chuffing great toffee-nosed rotters. They have been plopped out by a pin-striped conveyor belt that stretches back to King William IV. The very men who are loading students up with more debts than RBS and who have just introduced the biggest public spending cuts since 1918 are just about as press-my-tail-coat-and-call-me-m’lord upper class as a fox-lined top hat.

So, it comes as something of a surprise that during this age of austerity, when such bastions of public school, private income and aristocratic upbringings are pinching the working person’s purse, so many of us are glued to Downton Abbey. Julian Fellowes’ latest TV instalment in the Gosford Park, Servants and Upstairs, Downstairs mould is a cacophony of class injustice, yet over 7.6 million of us tuned in to the ITV debut and the series has already announced a second series. Shining silver, silent servants, disenfranchised women, colossal unearned incomes and an expendable working class; when it comes to Sunday night viewing, it seems the aristocracy still holds us in thrall.

This is not, however, a straight-to-ITV trend. From Ivy League-harping Vampire Weekend to stately home twonking Olly Murs to Albion trinketing Doherty, pop is dressing posher than a Fortnum & Mason hamper. Is it any wonder that Cameron-campaigning Gary Barlow chose to film the latest Take That video at Dorney Lake in Eton? Long gone are the days of leather chaps and homoerotic Mancunian jelly-rolling; with their short back-and-sides, Oxbridge rowing whites and modified sculling boat, the fab five look like extras in Brideshead Revisited, or Jerome K Jerome’s Edwardian romp Three Men in a Boat.

So, what does it say about the current cultural climate that in a time of recession, when so many of us have been told to tighten our belts, we have instead pulled on our Barbour jackets and Hunter wellies? That yet another Helena Bonham Carter period feature about the royal family proved a hit at the London Film Festival? That graphic designers choose to dress like Bertie Wooster?

We may blame super-rich city bankers and myopic moneyed politicians for the plight of the poor, but poshness, it seems, still reigns supreme.

More Nell:

...on cock ups

...on comebacks