I remain genuinely confused by the bizarre event that closed London Fashion Week, that flood relief benefit co-organised by the Rotary Club and Naomi Campbell, which starred for some reason Princess Beatrice and her mother the Duchess of York in £8m worth of borrowed jewellery and slinky, matching Dolce & Gabbana dresses.

Did the organisers of this loony floorshow really imagine, in their wildest dreams, that we would all gaze at the photographs of royalty and footballers and celebrities on the catwalk and think, gosh, what a wonderful job all these very special people are doing for the poor folk of Tewkesbury?

My only thought as I looked at the front-page picture of Bea in curlers clutching her BlackBerry backstage was, please God, that’s enough now. Please, let this stop. It’s about time the rich, the famous and the beautiful stopped using charity events as a vehicle for showcasing themselves and showing off about how much money they have to give away. Something has gone wrong with the art of giving if it has come to this.

Of course, we all look to the rich to give away their money and I am not saying that philanthropists such as the Mellons and the Carnegies were utterly uninterested in adding lustre to their own names. But the Mellons and Carnegies were, surely, more serious about bringing art and culture to the people than they were about seeing their faces in the newspapers.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, seems serious about bringing medical aid to the Third World and Sir Tom Hunter, the Scot who is ploughing some of his fortune into improving education, also seems high-minded in his aims.

Apart from these honourable exceptions, and of course all those who give anonymously, it is hard not to feel utterly fed up with narcissistic philanthropists and annoyed about being invited to swoon over these attention-crazed people as they preen in their designer gowns in front of the cameras yet again, or as they twirl in their long gowns en route to the white tie and tiara ball, with the lame excuse that it’s “all for charity”.

It’s not. It’s all for them. As Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder and director of the charity Kids Company, warned recently, there is a sort of “boys’ club” developing around giving. “It’s using the vulnerability of other people to self-promote,” she explained.

We know what she means. The Elton John Aids Foundation has raised more than £20m for charity, which is great, but there must be less splashy ways of helping the poor and the sick than spending £800,000 on a Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupé in front of a captive well-fed audience of all the people you want to impress most. I would hesitate to call Campbell a narcissistic philanthropist, in case she throws a diamond-encrusted mobile at me, but her interviews given to demonstrate her passion for the cause of flood relief in the Midlands seemed to prove Batmanghelidjh’s point about cause celebs and charidee.

When asked why she was doing a benefit for floods in England and not Asia – where 5m have been evacuated in China, where thousands of villages and roads have been wiped out, and where the continuous monsoon rains and cyclones have caused misery right across the continent including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal, affecting some of the poorest populations in the world, or for that matter Africa, which is also terribly afflicted – Campbell answered: “I do Third World, I’ve been doing Third World since 1994,” as if doing the Third World was a rite of passage for any supermodel, and then refused to answer any more questions.

So, given all the above, it’s a relief to discover that I am not alone in finding lavish pay-per-plate dinners an odd way of showing how much you care as well as how much you’re worth.

Alec Reed, who runs the employment agency, is next week launching a website for those who want to give in a targeted, intelligent and private way, rather than those who only ever get their chequebook out with their tiara. It’s called the Big Give and is targeted at the red-carpet market of those who want to give away £100,000 plus.

As he explained to me, if you’re very rich, “the problem is, it’s actually quite difficult to give away money intelligently”. He has set up this portal site, www.thebiggive.org.uk, to overcome the problem that the rich tend to give away stupidly. (After all, how much does the black tie dinner actually make for the cause concerned after costs have been netted off, d’oh?) The Reed site will provide masses of information about the charities and their accounts and also has a special button, he tells me, “for those who want to spend more than £10m”.

I would recommend all those who have been wondering whether going to a white tie event, at which they eat truffle soufflé and filet mignon off gold plates, counts as a “charitable act”, to give the website at least a whirl.

So it’s stand by for the next rumble in the jungle between the two big beasts of the . . . er, Liberal Democrats, Nick and Chris.

Nick Clegg is exactly the sort of young man that every mother prays her daughter might bring home and he is as nice as he looks. He is married to Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, a Spanish beauty, and has two children.

As for Chris Huhne, I’ve never met the man but have just looked at his website only to reel back, so daunted was I by his qualifications and his deep concern about all the things that matter – global security, sustainability, green taxes and so on.

Anyway, we were discussing the Lib Dems’ conference in Brighton – as one does – when a former journalist present piped up and warned us, darkly, that the looming Clegg v Huhne rivalry for Ming Campbell’s crown would be a titanic slugfest that would make Tony v Gordon seem like a teddy bears’ picnic.

“And I should know,” he went on, disclosing that he had shared a flat briefly with the well-thatched future MP for Eastleigh when they were both in their twenties and working on the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, the city’s two newspapers. Very briefly, in fact. After only four days he left.

“Why, what did Chris Huhne do?” we all demanded to know. “Chris would ask me if I’d used his toothpaste, or I’d open the fridge and take out the milk and find a label saying, ‘Chris’s milk’ on it. That sort of thing. You know,” he groaned.

We did. I fear these telling details reveal more about the mighty Huhne than anything in the long “About Chris” section on his boast-site.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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