Leafing through The Guardian this week, I have been gripped by extracts from a new book by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Unjust Rewards, in which the two Guardian stalwarts interview loads of rich people and discover that... they're not very nice.

Who would have thought? It's lucky we have The Guardian to get to the nub of things for us with its unique blend of snobbery, bitterness, jealousy and thwarted ambition, cobbled together with the tawdry and risible clichés its readers have thrilled to for years.

Dave and Polly begin with a trip to the 20th floor of Canary Wharf, only to find it “marbled”. Is it really, Dave? Is it, Polly? Or do you just need to write “marbled” to ram home your clunky, 1970s them-and-us dichotomy? Because two sentences later the same exact spot is suddenly “a gilded new town in the sky”. Ooh, gilded and marbled. How rich these people must be.

Polly and Dave chat for a while to some bankers and lawyers (hawk, spit) and discover that the fiends “utterly misjudged the magnitude of their privilege” and “put themselves inside a golden enclave”. Marbled, gilded, and golden. Dave and Polly are good. They should do bathrooms.

“They could scarcely deny they had money,” write Dave and Polly, as if any decent human being would. And then they tell us that they, Dave and Polly, are not so much angry as disappointed: “What we had hoped for was more awareness, some recognition that their position needed explaining and even justification.” You really hoped for that, Polly? Really, Dave? Then you're even stupider than you come across on paper.

And they get stupider. And more bitter. And more teacherly and smug. “As a group [the rich people] were less intelligent,” they crow, “less intellectually inquisitive, less knowledgeable and, despite their good schools, less broadly educated than high-flyers in other professions.” But we knew that. City lawyers and bankers have always been thick. They work inhuman hours at pointless jobs for their capitalist slave-masters and die young without really knowing their wives, their children or themselves. It's a horrible life. And they are given a lot of money to make up for it. What are you telling us, Polly? That they'd be happier living naked on a heath and eating dormice? We know that. They know that. Nobody cares. Shut up.

And then Dave and Polly write: “Their high salaries were not a sign of any obvious superiority.” Well, hell, guys, did you expect them to be? You're meant to be socialists. You really went grovelling in there, tugging your forelocks and expecting these people, on the basis of their wealth, to be in some way good or interesting? How stupid can you be? Your ideas are so thin and your politics so hackneyed and hamstrung by prejudice that you actually made me sympathise with the very rich. And I never thought anyone would be able to do that.

The next day, in my favourite paper's always-gripping education section (“Down wiv' Eton!”), there was another extract from the book, in which Dave and Polly had joined some state school kids from Brent on a trip to Oxford (I bet the kids were delighted).

The clichés here were more delicious still. Not only did the word “spires” appear twice in the same short extract, but the lawns, bless them, were “manicured”. Except they're not, Polly. They're just mown. Same as everywhere else. You don't have to be rich, or posh, or evil to mow the bloody lawn. They mow the lawn on council estates too. It's you, Polly, and you, Dave, who are trying to present Britain as a cartoonish, divided society to suit your own arrogant, dim-witted, outdated Weltanschauung.

Dave and Polly take the kids to St John's, which (no coincidence, I'm sure) is Oxford's richest college by some way: “Here was a room of their own, with their own bathroom, use of a kitchen...” Their own bathroom? I very much doubt it, even at St John's. Certainly not at Keble, next door to St John's, where I was a student. Six or eight to a bathroom at best (not all at the same time, alas). Get some perspective.

Despite Dave and Polly's best doom-mongering efforts, the kids on the trip show great enthusiasm for going to Oxford. So Dave and Polly leap in: “Did the Brent students know that over half the students at Oxford and Cambridge come from private schools? They had no idea and it shocked them.” Yeah, that's right, Polly, you step in and piddle on their dreams, why don't you. Tell them they've got no chance. It's your way, after all. (Furthermore, that statistic is another gross exaggeration as a correction in The Guardian admitted yesterday.)

It's not Oxford itself that holds back kids like this, it's sour old Trots like Toynbee.

Polly and Dave go on to contrast, with toe-curling naivety, the “kindly earnestness and bright whiteness” of the Oxford students with “the mostly black Brent kids in urban fashions with sharply razored, sculpted and combed hairstyles”, the prose dripping with that familiar and uniquely Guardian fetishising of black youth that seems to drip with middle-aged female lust for the noble savage. It's positively Victorian.

“Here on display,” wrote Dave and Polly, “was the great fissure in class, race, style, attitude, background...” No, here were children. The fissure is in your minds. In your sad, tawdry imaginations. Part of a world you need to believe in to believe you have any value left as

commentators.

“The Brent students will likely find themselves in a rust-stained concrete former polytechnic not far from home...” write Dave and Polly in tear-stained conclusion. More clichés, more fatalism. But how dare she/he condemn them like that to their doom? And how dare she/he stigmatise former polytechnics in that way? Rust-stained, for God's sake. How can these new universities hope to attract decent students, and be taken seriously in the academic world, if the bien-pensant dimwits of The Guardian opinion pages are so quick to dismiss them?

Staying with education, I see that primary schools will be weighing children and informing their parents of the results, but they will not be allowed to use the medical term “obese”, because it might cause offence. This is excellent news because the forbidding of words and the compulsion to euphemism leads to so much more ingenious ways of writing what you mean:

“Dear Mr and Mrs Wisbeech, your son, Arnold, has been weighed in the balance... and broke it.”

“Dear Mr and Mrs Funt, your daughter, Ellie, has not been weighed today, as planned, because when she took off her dress prior to mounting the scales the doctor laughed so hard he had an embolism.”

“Dear Mr Jarse, your son, Hugh, was weighed today. We are not saying he is fat, we are just saying that from next term we will be charging fees for both of him.”

“Dear Mrs Hunt, your son, Eric, was weighed today and the school doctor will be writing to you with the results just as soon as he can break free of Eric's gravitational pull.”

“Dear Mrs Hunt, your other son, Warwick, was also weighed. Tell you what, if you can guess his weight to the nearest stone, we'll forget about all those broken chairs.”

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