Would the Duke of Edinburgh ever buy a bright orange pair of trousers? Would your 14-year-old daughter wear a calf-length tweed skirt and a hand-knitted cardigan? Can you imagine Sir Ranulph Fiennes in a mankini?

The fact is this. A very, very small number of people choose to buy and wear an item of clothing because of the quality of its stitching or the way it hangs, even when hailing a cab. But mostly, people only wear what they think suits them.

People drive what they think suits them as well. A harassed woman, for instance, knows that her bird’s nest hair and nightie go well with a Volvo XC90. A woman with expensive hair on her head and none at all between her legs realises that she can have nothing but a Range Rover. Red cheeks and overalls work with Mitsubishi’s pick-up trucks. Lacy tops look right in a Peugeot. And the Audi and the Montblanc pen fit together as beautifully as the ladder and the Vauxhall Astra.

Naturally, this brings me on to the Ford Focus RS. Who does it suit? What person did Ford’s marketing department have in mind when it said: “Yes. Let’s give it a wing the size of Tommy Sopwith’s and wheelarches big enough to provide shelter for a herd of cows. And yes again. Let’s sell it with a choice of just three colours: lime green, Rooney blue and toilet white.”

Can you think of anyone who would wish to own such a thing? We know that Rio Ferdinand has a strange taste in shorts and that David Beckham is not averse to going out at night in a skirt. They would probably love a lime green Ford with a Boeing appendage on the back. But top-flight footballers earn as much as £150,000 a week and will not therefore be interested in a £26,000 Ford.

I am aware, too, that small boys like cars such as this. But when they grow old enough to drive, they are also old enough to know it’s a bit onyx; a bit Cheshire, a bit vulgar.

We know that Jonathan Ross has a pair of yellow training shoes. We also know he has a pink Ford Thunderbird. But would he want an RS? No. Nor would Stephen Fry, Susan Boyle, David Attenborough, Konnie Huq, Kirsty Young, Ian Hislop, Brian Ferry, Mick Jagger or Harry Potter.

No one would, because these days we know the rules. In the UK the Daily Mail regularly informs us that that anyone who earns more than £40,000 should be made to stand in the street and rub off their own face with a cheese grater.

That’s why those who do buy Ferraris increasingly ask for them to be grey and it’s why the ivory white Mercedes SL is not an everyday sighting. Because this is showing off. And showing off is bad.

There is no question, then, that if you want a smallish, fastish hatchback you are better off with a VW Golf GTI, which looks just like the diesel and consequently will not be smeared with dog dirt by the Mail’s Paul Dacre every morning. And that normally would be the end of that.

But it isn’t, because underneath the vivid paintwork and behind the wall of crackling, sash-window-rattling

noise coming out of the Ford’s twin exhaust tunnels lies the sort of fun and games that the Golf GTI simply can’t deliver. The Volkswagen is a game of chess. The Focus is a game of strip poker.

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