A middle-class crime wave is ripping through Britain. One Neil Matthews, vice-president of the security firm Checkpoint Systems, last week unveiled a fat report showing that high street shoplifting is up by nearly 20%.

Since the stuff that’s being nicked is slightly posher than usual — “high-end cheeses and meats”, meaning ripe brie rather than Cheestrings, prosciutto not Spam — he has deduced, Holmes-like, that it’s the aspirational bourgeoisie whodunnit.

On the one hand I suppose we should be flattered, we middling sorts. Even as our reputation for respectability is dragged through the mud, we are credited with discernment. We may not be willing to pay above the odds or indeed, as Matthews would have it, to pay at all. But — hah! — we still know what’s good and what’s not. That fussiness, after all, is our calling card. By our swag — free-trade, vine-ripened, seasonal and fresh — shall ye know us.

Matthews is a bit short on actual data but maybe we shouldn’t be unkind: it’s an extremely delicate task defining the middle class. Not even Stalin got it right, although he did try.

Now I’m no expert, but in my book a larcenous interest in “high-end cheeses and meats” takes you only so far up the social scale. Belief in the importance of piano lessons, Radio 4 and thank-you letters is probably a more reliable indicator, but how many security guards these days have the time to ask? It’s much easier to notice a bagful of rocket (washed, ready-to-eat, organic) in a passing pocket — and draw the immediate conclusion.

Seriously, just how does Matthews know it’s us? He has heard, from shop security teams, that there’s been an increase in the proportion of amateur thieves, as compared with the numbers of drug addicts or career criminals.

“They are catching shoplifters who from their appearance you would not expect to steal, and whose demeanour when caught show them to be different from your typical shoplifter. We are seeing more instances than before of amateur thieves stealing goods for their own personal use rather than to sell on,” he says. “These amateurs also tend to be caught by fairly basic security equipment, whereas career criminals would be able to avoid that.”

In other words, it boils down to this: security goons have noticed that the people they are catching aren’t very good at stealing. (Duh! Of course they aren’t: that’s why they get caught.) And once caught, of course, they are embarrassed.

Matthews blames the recession for this collapse in middle-class morality. Presumably a lot of people have got used to extra-virgin olive oil; now they can’t afford to drizzle it as freely as of old and that’s highly embarrassing. (Embarrassment is beginning to prove something of a marker: career criminals and drug addicts don’t blush much.) Now, the recession is a good topical twist to the story but — as you might have sensed — I don’t buy it. Any of it. My college friend Celia, the beautiful daughter of a High Court judge, didn’t buy much either. She used to have a profitable sideline as an undergraduate, cooking up delicious dinners for fellow students and delivering them in enormous pots balanced on her bicycle. She and her housemate were fine cooks in the boeuf bourguignon/coq-au-vin tradition but they soon discovered their real skills lay elsewhere, in managing overheads. There weren’t any.

They wheeled their groaning trolleys through the supermarkets of Oxford with confidence and charm. They must have slipped past the tills — I didn’t find out how — but they never paid. Most of Celia’s clients chose to remain ignorant of the source of their excellent — and reasonably priced — dinners, but at least one, her boyfriend, roused himself enough to object. He was bought off with a lovely warm Marks & Spencer woolly.

Celia was successful dozens of times. Until one day she wasn’t. The prosecution took place in the summer holidays, she was named, shamed and left with a criminal record. Twenty years later she lives in Australia and pays for her groceries. She has grown up.

That’s the enduring story behind the statistics behind the headlines. A closer look at the report, which was compiled by the Centre for Retail Research in Nottingham, makes it clear there’s been an increase in shoplifting but it’s nothing like the figures bandied about last week — 8.6%, rather than 20% — and the middle classes are just a small part of the bigger picture. Indeed, the academic responsible for the report, Professor Joshua Bamfield, tells me despairingly that everyone’s gone bananas over its least significant element. His researchers, he says, “aren’t Marxist and don’t divide research by class”.

They do, however, notice the ages of shoplifters: “It is very prevalent among teenagers and a lot of people in their mid-twenties, but then it tends to fall off.” Think about it and this makes perfect sense: everyone knows a thief and many of us have lifted stuff ourselves — Bamfield reckons a third of men have shoplifted and almost as many women — but ask around among your mortgage-paying, child-bearing acquaintances and you will find few who are still light-fingered.

Why’s that? It’s not just the risks involved, for these are negligible. (Of 50m “shoplifting events” annually, only 500,000 arrests are made and a mere 25,000 go to court.) Nor is it the lack of opportunity: Bamfield points out that retailers have cut back on security spending in order to survive. No, I think it’s a kind of consumer jadedness that creeps up with age. I certainly remember really wanting stuff when I was little, a sharp hard pointy want for a bear or a doll, which felt like a physical pain. In adolescence, clothes or make-up had the same effect. I still have an eyebrow pencil filched from Boots aged 14 and, shamefully, a Laura Ashley blouse whose sole merit was its lack of a security tag.

And now? The current of desire has gone into reverse: I mooch dully round the shopping centres at Westfield or Bluewater and am beaten senseless with free offers, discounts, vouchers and insanely complex money-back deals involving improbable combinations of face cream and toothpaste until I long for nothing more than ... nothing.

Call it the four ages of — middle-class — woman. We’ve stolen from shops, worked in shops and bought from shops. These days our greatest joy is taking stuff to shops and begging the doubtful charity worker behind the till to accept it. One Laura Ashley blouse, circa 1980, scarcely worn: surely someone, somewhere, will take it off my hands?

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