At Boris Johnson’s celebration party last weekend there were, apparently, loads of oysters and rich public-school boys. You could tell the difference between them because the public-school boys did not need to be opened with a shucking knife, gratifying though that might have been to see. There was also caviar, served by cowering piccaninnies and “Champagne! Champagne!” for everybody.

It seems that Boris’s election to the office of mayor of London has confirmed a sea change in the zeitgeist; after decades of people mistrusting toffs for their stupidity and braying, it is now okay, or okay yah, to be posh again.

Hence David Cameron’s majestic lead in the opinion polls, the accession of the very-U Nick Clegg to leadership of the Lib Dems and the willingness of Europe’s most classless electorate, Londoners, to choose plump-vowelled Old Etonian Boris over adenoidal lower-middle-class Ken. Being born with a silver spoon rammed halfway up your left nostril is once again “cool”. And it does not even matter if you possess the IQ of shrubbery, so long as you can trace your lineage back through centuries of inbreeding to some hirsute regional satrap of Edward the Confessor and know of Ikea only by ill repute.

There is more to this than political fashion. The credit crunch has left the hard-working, intelligent working class who staff the City’s broking houses (and thus have provided the country’s wealth for the past 20 years) either out of a job or fearing for their futures. Nobody is shedding a tear for them: instead, there is glee. The lesson to be learnt is that breeding is a gilt-edged commodity, impervious to the slump-boom cycle.

At the same time, laughing at the hopeless working class has become the staple of primetime television and a succession of its most witless offspring – Jade Goody, Heather Mills, Jordan, Robbie Williams, Callum Best, everyone who has ever appeared in any reality TV show, all footballers – are paraded for our collective scorn.

Blue-collar predilections and pastimes have likewise been shredded – smoking, affection for alcohol and feckless hedonism. Their views on race and immigration are considered quite unspeakable in polite company. No wonder, then, that people have decided this is a class fit only for Asbos and service in Basra. There might be something to be said, after all, for Eton or Harrow.

Oddly, I always overlooked Boris Johnson’s toffishness, even though it was the most obvious thing about him. I love his irreverence and humour and openness to political unorthodoxies. I think he will be a fine mayor. But I do not like the notion that on his coat-tails will come a succession of highborn little monkeys with expensively acquired loquaciousness and self-confidence and nothing between the ears.

- Mothering Sunday, over here, may well be a commercial enterprise of the most saccharine kind and emetic, too - my mother once told me that if I ever sent her a Mother’s Day card, she’d smash all my toys with a claw hammer. However, today it is Mother’s Day in China, which is a rather different, and somewhat less commercialised, business. It has become a focus of dissent for the mothers of those 1,000 protesters estimated to have been murdered by Chinese government forces in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

As such, commemorating the day has become a subversive act, as no media outlets within that benighted country are allowed to mention anything about 1989 at all unless they just say it was a really quiet year, nothing much happened, business as usual. An award-winning journalist, Shi Tao, is in prison for 10 years merely for having sent an e-mail to someone outside China about the whole business.

But the mums, risking imprisonment, continue to remind the world what really happened. You can send them an electronic Mother’s Day card via Amnesty International’s website, which will make up for you hastily buying your own mum a bunch of withered carnations from the Shell garage at the end of the road, or nicked from the railings at the site where some poor soul was stabbed a couple of months ago.

Kelly, I’d sooner talk to the wall

Here’s a picture of two objects: can you tell them apart? One is a large, solidly constructed inanimate presence that we see every day but never notice because it is utterly devoid of interest and the other is a brick wall.

The photograph purports to show Kelly Osbourne, dingbat daughter of dingbat Ozzy, a little the worse for wear after partying at a London nightclub and leaning on a wall for support. Or maybe it was the wall that had been in the club and was leaning on Kelly for support. Either way, who cares?

I find the presence of the appalling Osbournes, especially that smug witch of a mum, on our screens every day quite unfathomable. The series that brought them to fame was funny because it showed the daily travails of a collection of extremely dysfunctional and very stupid people. In that context, it worked.

But now we have Sharon hosting her own shows and acting as a judge and mentor on talent contests – her qualifications for so doing presumably evinced by her decision to marry Ozzy. And then there is Kelly doing a phone-in problem show. How bereft of hope must you be to look to Kelly Osbourne for advice? You’d be better off talking to a brick wall.

[This article refers to a photograph not published on the website]

Honestly, officer, my drinksh got shpiked . . .

Dutiful parents Eamon and Antoinette McGuckin were not drunk on the night that the Portuguese authorities took their children into care - the blackouts and vomiting were a result of having their drinks spiked with some mysterious narcotic, say friends.

I, for one, believe this, as the same thing keeps happening to me and one day soon I will catch the culprit – because I’ve worked out that the Mickey Finn is invariably administered somewhere between my 13th and 15th pint of Stella. After that, I stagger around, am violently ill and fall asleep in the Topshop doorway next to a half-eaten kebab.

The police never believe me, either, but give me that look they reserve for suspects who insist: “Officer, I downloaded it all for research purposes.”

We should be more credulous and less cynical. So let’s trust Paris Hilton’s publicist who, when asked to comment on a photograph of his client that showed white stuff coming out of her nose, said: “I would imagine it’s something like whipped cream or a sugary substance from dessert. I’d label it a stray dessert.” Too right, mate. Probably a bit of meringue. She likes her meringues, does Paris. Especially Colombian meringues.

- Good news for those of you living in Derbyshire who intend to indulge in the traditional Sunday evening pursuit of “dogging” – meeting total strangers for alfresco sexual intercourse, while being eagerly watched through a car window by “pikers”. The Derbyshire County Primary Care Trust, which clearly does not wish to fritter away its budget on cancer, heart disease and stuff like that, is targeting local dogging hotspots to hand out free condoms to the participants. Perhaps they will soon be providing warming bowls of postcoital soup, too.

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