It is six years since the young but already rich Wayne Rooney walked into a West London estate agents and inquired about properties for sale. Extending the time-honoured welcome to teenage lads who look as if they've never been near a public school rugger field, the agent promptly warned him to leave the shop or he'd call the police. The wild assumption was that the ginger bruiser with the face like a melted welly might be casing houses to burgle.

Then, Rooney was a 17-year-old Evertonian wonderkid earning £6,000 a week. Now he's worth £30 million and is one of our country's dazzling success stories. No matter. Kinleigh, Folkard & Hayward of Chelsea didn't like the cut of his shellsuit and showed him the door. I wonder if, reading the supercilious tone of many of the previews of his and Coleen McLoughlin's wedding in Italy this week, Rooney thinks much has changed since 2002.

Nah - course it hasn't, Wayne. We're as uncomfortable and distrustful as we ever were with the idea of council house kids like you having shedloads of money. So entrenched are we in our know-your-place class system that the son of a Croxteth dinner lady enjoying a £5 million wedding somehow seems like an unnatural perversion, like a haddock wearing a pair of wedges.

So we comb through the details of the “FOUR DAY NUPTIALS!” for evidence of vulgarity. Tee, hee - hear about their plan to make every guest release a butterfly into the sky at the exact moment they are pronounced husband and wife? (Sick bags are not provided, wrote one quality newspaper.) Ho, ho - hear that Wayne was gutted because he couldn't find his favourite drink, WKD Blue, on his Ibiza stag do? So naff!

The Daily Mail, which once asked: “Is this Britain's ghastliest couple?”, spotted that Rooney's mother Jeanette had lost weight. So it invited a plastic surgeon to analyse photos of her. He thought that Jeanette “may have had a gastric band fitted” but “still looks older than her 41 years - I'd have put her at 48 or 49”. The condition of her skin suggested “she's probably a smoker”. Hard to imagine the mother of a debutante getting this sort of going-over.

And it's not just newspapers. The simmering sentiment generally seems to be: “Who do these people think they are?” Well, I think that they're infinitely classier than some of the so-called nobility who flog their weddings to celebrity magazines without a blush. Magazines, incidentally, read in provincial hair salons by the sort of women at which the upper crust would look down their noses.

Rooney was raised on a rough council estate with zero privileges. But he didn't join gangs or live on state handouts; he worked his nuts off from childhood to perfect his talent and now reaps the benefit. If he wants to sell his wedding to OK! magazine for £2.5 million then good luck to him. At least he's a positive advert for the rewards of determination and hard graft.

Can we say the same of Princess Anne's son, Peter Phillips, who trousered £500,000 for letting Hello! turn his wedding to Autumn Kelly into a 100-page circus? Does money mean so much to the young royals that they'll even sell their granny? The Queen's photograph appeared in Hello! without her permission. Nice. This is tackier than any WAG's wedding. Rooney can hold his head high because his every penny has been earned. No inheritance, no private schooling, no influential relatives. The young royals have all the advantages, yet Zara Phillips still invites Hello! into her home and Viscount Linley splashes his baby across its glossy pages.

Far from exploiting his friends and family, Rooney showers them with generosity. Yes, his family have kicked off at previous family dos, but guess what - I've heard that royals get bladdered occasionally too.

Coleen, meanwhile, has been slated for cashing in on the Rooney name and landing a jammy media career (even I winced when I saw that she describes herself as a journalist). But why pick on her when there are no better experts at milking the family name than the royals and their hangers-on, and with far less excuse to do so?

Besides, Coleen is practically a maiden intact. She's been with Rooney since she was a schoolgirl; he's the only boyfriend she's ever had. She's also generous, asking that instead of wedding gifts people make donations to Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool. And a percentage of the OK! fee is going to the Claire House children's hospice in Cheshire. Does that sound like the usual celebrity magazine fodder to you? No, me neither.

But it's no good. With her nouveau finery Coleen is audaciously striding into a world in which she doesn't belong. So she faces the same snobbery as “waitey” Kate Middleton, a middle-class girl whose mother says, ugh, “toilet”, and who is guilty of daring to imagine herself a future Queen.

No, we like people to stay safely where they are so that we know where to pigeonhole them for life. It's why we're disorientated by the druggie aristocrat who ends up a street bum, but comforted by the Mrs Mopp who wins £10 million on the lottery yet vows to carry on cleaning khazis and splashes her cash on a static caravan in Morecambe.

If I were Rooney I'd be tempted to rack up the ostentation another notch. He should rub our sneery noses in it this weekend: then conga out of the night do to Agadoo with his new wife's La Perla knickers on his head. Obviously.

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