This column is not really about Diana. And it is not about supermarkets. Nor is it about satellite dishes, or shell suits, or hoods, or The Sun, fish fingers, Ryanair, easyJet or frozen food. It is about all these things and yet none of them. It is about the hate that dare not speak its name: class hatred.

It is about hate-by-proxy: the distaste (I share it) for Dianamania, the dislike of supermarkets, the hatred (I’m not immune to it) of redtops, the shudder (mine, sometimes) at low-cost airlines . . . all these allergens in the very air the top half of society must breathe have something in common. They remind us of the mob. I submit that, however weak or strong the justifications we may offer for our disapproval of a variety of features of what might be called mass culture, these various antipathies are inflamed by a single, secret anxiety, as old as the French Revolution, which in modern democracy we find it hard to acknowledge: fear of the common people.

Let’s start with supermarkets: a touchy subject in modern Britain. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. “Supermarkets –– love ’em or loathe ’em” ran the intro to Jon Manel’s series of discussions on the BBC Today programme, running all week. You’d have thought we were encountering one of the great questions of our time, the kind of debate that pits village against village and tears families apart: slavery, the Irish Question, Suez, Iraq, and Tesco.

Which is odd, because the series featured a specially commissioned poll whose most notable finding was that 79 per cent of respondents liked supermarkets. Among a curmudgeonly public it doesn’t get much better than this: chocolate-covered cream puffs, Mother Teresa or a beach holiday in the Caribbean would be unlikely to outperform the British supermarket industry’s 79 per cent approval-rating. So why, like a recurring theme through public debate in recent decades, does “down with supermarkets” keep elbowing its way into commentary and news? If I hadn’t guessed already, a packed public meeting in Andover (where the radio programme took us) protesting against a proposed Tesco warehouse development, gave the game away to any listener with an ear for English accents.

People at the Andover meeting sounded posh. We heard none speaking with anything other than Received Pronunciation. Odd, for I know Andover; my nana lived there, and she had nothing against Tesco. But she was called Nana, not Gran, and that should alert you to something about the majority not present. Nana wasn’t, and they aren’t, posh. I have checked my hunch with locals and it was right: the driving force behind opposition to this development comes from the better-off: from the villages around the town; not from the estates and housing developments in the town itself.

Dislike of supermarkets is an overwhelmingly middle-to-upper-middle-class phenomenon. All classes use supermarkets, but it is the top half of society that voices (and genuinely feels) a distaste for them. Why? The same question may be asked about the wave of revulsion (I share it) that swept the middle-to-upper echelons of society after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when images of public grief and crowd sentimentality dominated the news. Little had changed yesterday, ten years on. The accents among the crowds were rough. Those voicing distaste for Dianamania were well spoken. This was a well-born woman but the common people loved her and mourned her loss, and the Establishment dislikes both their love and their grief. Why?

And do you remember the arrival in Britain of satellite television? At first its big selling point was sport – football and boxing – plus American cartoons like The Simpsons; and its initial market penetration was stronger on council estates than country estates. With it came satellite dishes: inoffensive objects, a good deal more tasteful and less prominent than the ugly metal TV aerials already on almost every roof. Yet there were endless complaints and letters to broadsheet newspapers, and in some places the dishes were for a while banned as aesthetically unacceptable. Why?

Today we have low-cost airlines like Ryanair and easyJet. With them has come cheap-flight-phobia. My observation as a frequent Ryanair flier is that the better-off use these flights more or less in proportion to our comparative numbers, and a flight to Perpignan or Girona is typically a fair cross-section of British society. It is also, typically, full, with minimum leg-room and restricted luggage, and therefore (in pints of fuel per pound of flesh) the second-most-environmentally friendly form of flight (after hang-gliding) known to man. This has not prevented an often scathing campaign against the whole idea of cheap flights. Among voices raised in this cause I have yet to hear a working-class accent.

Luton is a more efficient and less bothersome airport than Heathrow, yet people I know affect disdain at the idea of flying from there. Why? You have only to remind yourself of the horror expressed by the educated in the 19th century at the advent of railways (Wordsworth shudders at the idea that any fool in Bakewell could be in Buxton in half an hour, and vice versa) to understand their modern counterparts’ excess of eco-sensitivity in the face of cheap flying.

You have only to read the 18th-century coffee shop derision at the mass hysteria of the grieving London mob at the hanging of the Rev Dr Dodd to understand modern Highgate’s horror of Dianamania. To understand today’s snootiness about Tesco, recall the early 20th century’s snootiness about the very idea of cooperative stores. Popular newssheets have appalled the well-bred since popular newssheets began. The Hillsborough tragedy brought mountains of wreaths nearly a decade before Diana.

Diana’s death did not change Britain. It reminded the modern Establishment of its deep insecurity in the face of the English mob: an object of fear, wonder and distaste since long before Spanish travellers returned to the imperial court in Madrid with horror stories of rough and volatile crowds who shouted in public and kissed and embraced each other in front of strangers. Ever since the French Revolution the top half of English society has glanced nervously at the crowd outside the window and muttered “could it happen here?”.

We don’t really trust democracy. We don’t really like our countrymen. We no longer dare say so, not directly. So we sneer at their shops, shudder at their newspapers, disapprove of their means of mobility, find their joys tasteless and recoil even from their grief.

Mock tacky TV soap-opera all you like – and then tune in to The Archers; joke about shell suits then fork out for silk; bemoan the greenhouse gas emissions of a cheap flight then emit four times as much flying business class. But don’t pretend this is about quality or worth, the environment, taste or even beauty. It’s partly about class. It always has been. It still is.

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