It's the only thing a girl can think after picking up a complimentary copy of the crappy free mag Ms London in which irritating mega-pseud and bandwagon jumper extraordinaire Julie Burchill claimed to be the inspiration for the character of Vicky Pollard in the rawther funny sketch show 'Little Britain'. Can we say 'I really don't think so'? I do believe we can.

For all my readers who are not residents of the UK: Julie Burchill is an obese newspaper columnist and one-woman circus with a tendency to write irritating think-pieces in whichever of the broadsheets has been stupid enough to give the woman a contract this month. Once she starts writing, inevitable as night following day, the newspaper is bombarded with complaints about her columns. On her inevitable departure, she will make snide comments about her ex-employers, claiming that they failed to understand her because she was a) a woman, b) working-class or c) a working-class woman. Vicky Pollard is a loud-mouthed teenage chavette in a pink Kappa tracksuit, played by Matt Lucas...

... Actually, all my readers who are not residents of the UK may like to skip this one. This update's so Anglo-centric it may well verge on the utterly nonsensical to anyone who isn't ensconced on this tiny, windswept isle clinging to the ass-end of Europe.

Julie, could you please get off your hobby horse about this whole 'Look at me, I'm working class!' thing? Small children ride hobby horses. Grown-up newspaper columnists, consequently, should not ride hobby horses unless they wish to risk looking like small children. My dear, you are many things, some of them very surprising, but working class is not one of them unless the meaning of working class is stretched considerably to include everyone in the country who has to work for a living. Investment bankers have to work for a living. So do Harley Street doctors and, what the hell, high-profile newspaper columnists. It does not make them working class. Seriously, though, it's becoming ridiculous. Like Tracey ('Look at me, I come from Margate!') Emin, Julie appears to be slipping into the realms of self-caricature.

Five reasons why Julie Burchill is nothing like Vicky Pollard...
(and, incidentally, is nowhere near as working-class as she claims, either.)

• Julie Burchill writes for the Times; Vicky Pollard can barely write her own name.


• Listening to Vicky Pollard talk is actually amusing.


• Vicky Pollard has never appeared on a TV discussion programme.


• Julie Burchill was never an obese gymslip mum with ADD.


• Vicky Pollard is fictional; I only wish Julie Burchill was fictional.

I don't deny that Julie Pollard may have come from a working-class background, but considering that she is now a highly paid member of the intelligentsia, I would say she'd kind of left that behind. It is possible to move into a class other than the one you have been born into. As the daughter of two teachers, brought up in a highly culturally aware household, I would classify myself as coming from lower middle class stock. I'm now living in one room in South London, trying to survive on a student nurse's bursary. That, I'd imagine, makes me working-class. Therefore, Vicky Burchill, I'd say that, though you may come from a working-class background, gaining employment as a journalist - and not just your average hard-bitten hack, may I add, but a well-known one who writes for a national newspaper and often appears on TV and radio - has promoted you.

Okay, Julie, if you're so working-class, would you like to go live in a flat in a council estate surrounded by the families and people you claim to feel such an affinity for? Would you like to lose your savings and talented salary and try and live on the hourly rate you'd make working on the checkouts in Asda, or on the derisory dole? Would you like to lie awake nights in a poorly-heated room, worrying about how the Hell you're going to pay the electricity bill and still afford to eat? Or sequester yourself behind an iron gate, practically imprisoning yourself in your own home, because you're so worried about being burgled, or worse?

Of course you bloody wouldn't. Nor do any of the working-class families whose lives you eulogize and seem to claim to covet. They'd love to be where you are now; so would a lot of people. So for God's sake stop it with the 'working-class' crap, and grow the hell up.

Oh - and about the 'Chav' thing. You are not a chav either, Julie. You're about as chavvy as John Major. And if chavs are the only class in England who can get called names without anyone complaining: tell that to the upper middle classes. They don't get this hot under the collar about being called Sloanes. Homosexuals have just had to learn to live with the offensive epithets aimed at them, too. And so on and so forth, etcetera blah, blah, blah. The chavs are not uniquely oppressed, Julie. They're barely oppressed at all. Get over it.