Reports that Her Royal Highness, Princess Bea, is being lined up with work experience on a national newspaper nearly had me choking to death on my Coco Pops. How typical of this country's lack of meritocracy!

At her age I was pleading for such journalism placements, with Adrian Mole levels of enthusiasm, but didn't get much further than a summer job at Burger King, where a manager who fancied herself as a comedian made me, among other things, spend an afternoon counting sesame seeds on hamburger bread buns “to provide feedback to the bakery”.

But Princess Bea just guffaws her buck-toothed way into a placement at the very top of the profession because her bloodline can be traced back to the Knights Templar and the Fifth Crusade, or something. So much for John Major's classless society.

The irritation was just beginning to subside - helped, in part, by reports that Princess Bea might not take up the placement after all (maybe she has been struck by the realisation that she doesn't need to work) - when it was renewed by suggestions that we are not allowed to resent the posh any more.

Evidence cited included a report from the Advertising Standards Authority that it had received dozens of complaints about a Privilege car insurance campaign featuring Nigel Havers, on the grounds that it was “stereotypical and projects an offensive view of the upper class”, and the debacle of the Labour Party's Crewe and Nantwich by-election campaign, which focused on mocking the Conservative candidate as a top-hatted Tory Boy.

“It smacks of desperation,” remarked Eton-educated Tory leader David Cameron, who knows a thing or two about poshness, given his family wealth has been estimated at some £30 million, and desperation, having worked as a PR man for Carlton Communications. “It is divisive, negative, backward-looking, out of date and class war. The country has moved on from that.” Has it? The posh fightback is certainly part of a new trend, where previously mockable groups are standing up for themselves. A couple of years ago we began hearing young people, tired of being portrayed as morons, demanding the right not to be discriminated against at work, with the Employers Forum on Age declaring that it was a myth that age discrimination affected only the over-50s. “It is a bigger problem for people in their late teens,” they said, adding that the youth of today were too often given unchallenging roles, ignored and underpaid.

More recently, obesity has become the big issue in business, with the fat lobby throwing its weight around after a poll showed that more than 90 per cent of HR professionals would hire a slim person over an obese one. And now we have the posh insisting that they should not be discriminated against just because they were born under the shadow of a Canaletto and will one day inherit 3,000 acres of Norfolk. You should not look at who people are but at what they are, the argument goes. If you prick a fattie, a yoof or a toff, do they not bleed? Bigotry is bigotry.

Except that it isn't. Not all isms are equally offensive. To compare racial prejudice, the repression of women, discrimination against the disabled, homophobia and ageism against the elderly to posh-ism, fattism or youth-ism is like comparing Princess Bea to Princess Leia.

And the idea that the upper and upper-middle classes deserve protection when they already have such a head start in life, is...I was going to say “political correctness gone mad”, but it is actually the exact opposite. It's anti-political correctness gone mad. These groups have seen the help offered to the underprivileged and are demanding the same. Who'll be asking for sympathy next? Estate agents? Not all prejudice is misplaced and the idea that human beings can or should greet one another with the kind of neutrality that supermarket cash registers scan bar codes with is unrealistic. The fact is that lots of obese people eat too much, are lazy and have no self-discipline - and it's OK for us to think that, unless they prove otherwise on an individual basis. The fact is that most young people are inexperienced and need to start off in lowly jobs, until they prove otherwise on an individual basis. And it's the same with the posh.

In general, they are arrogant, insular, chinless, clueless, have a troubling predilection for green wellies and velvet hairbands, bray and honk, have silly hyphenated names, and big teeth that they don't part enough when speaking. The Labour Party's Crewe and Nantwich by-election campaign failed not because voters suddenly love them, but because it was juvenile, because the Labour Party has been in power for too long, and because Gordon Brown is about as popular as Glenn Alan Medeiros's second album.

If the Conservatives suddenly think that the public is not concerned that the next government might be packed with chubby-cheeked toffs who, under the shadows of Oxford's dreaming spires, prattled about as tail-coated Edwardian gents in exclusive drinking societies that refused entry to women, state school pupils and Jews, they're mistaken.

Having so many poshos running the country is a terrifying prospect. They have no idea what life is like for most people - what it is like to have no choice but to rely on state schools, the NHS, and public transport, or what it is like, frankly, to spend entire afternoons counting sesame seeds on hamburger buns. Of course, they are capable of developing an understanding, but they cannot demand the benefit of the doubt - it's their job to prove that our prejudices are misplaced.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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