Reading the news that a glamour model is having an argument with a nightclub about entrance to a VIP enclosure will tempt many Times readers to request a large polo mallet with which to bring an end to the dispute. It seems unlikely that anything important could be at issue.

And yet it is. This country's inability to overcome its obsession with class is at issue. For that is what the row between Katie Price - better known as the model Jordan - and Chinawhite - the nightclub that excluded her from its marquee at the Cartier Polo Match - is about.

Those in charge of invitations and selling tickets decided that, horse owner and pony fan though she is, Ms Price was a Cartier accessory too many. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this decision was made because those in charge thought she is déclassée.

Polo, from its origins as battle training for the armies of the ancient Persian Empire, was the sport of nobles. The involvement of a celebrity nightclub, whose experience of chukkas goes beyond the polo field, suggests that in modern times the sport has become, how best to put it, more democratic. Yet snobbishness clearly remains, made worse rather than better by having become comically pretentious.

The incident may be trivial, the story it tells is not. Class division disfigures this country and it sometimes seems as if the greatest progress that Britain has made in dismantling class barriers is to widen the number of people who feel themselves entitled to be snobs. In 2001 Jordan ran for Parliament with the slogan “For a bigger and betta future”. By challenging polo snobbery she has struck a blow for such a future.