Andy Capp was hiding behind a newspaper in yesterday’s Daily Mirror cartoon strip, so it was impossible to tell whether he was wearing a flat cap.

But it seems that lots of other people are. Asda is selling lots of them. But the boom is not in the North, where the flat ’at has long been part of the regional stereotype; it is in the traditionally sophisticated South.

The store reports an increase in sales of flat caps of 82.3 per cent over the past two years, almost all in the South East.

Asda’s biggest seller — a country-style burgundy and brown number — now sells more than three times as many in the South as in the North.

Think of a flat-cap wearer and you automatically think of either northern or old: the late Fred Dibnah, Lancastrian steeplejack and steam engine nut, or that arch-curmudgeon Victor Meldrew. But the baton of cap-wearing has passed to chavs, celebs, rappers and, of course, toffs thanks to role models such as Guy Ritchie and David Cameron.

Mr Cameron is probably already surrounded by a huddle of advisers debating whether he should appear at his next photo-op in a cap; it would at least hide which side his hair was parted.

David Beckham, the international clothes horse, occasionally favours the flat cap, as do Samuel L. Jackson, the actor, and a number of rappers. The cloth cap as cartoonists’ shorthand for northern, pigeon-fancying working class is clearly dead.

So what are northern men wearing nowadays? “Baseball caps,” Alan Slater, a spokesman for Asda, said. But flat-cap sales in the North were not declining — “just static”.

Toffs, of course, who stand above the vagaries of fashion, have always worn flat hats as part of the English country gentleman’s regulation leisure gear, whether shooting, walking the labradors or simply inspecting the estate.

Among lower castes the flat hat has gone through cycles of popularity. Look at any archive black-and-white photograph of a Toon or Preston North End game from the late 19th century until the postwar era, and every man Jack in that football crowd is wearing one.

In the 1920s fashionable young men adopted the habit; the Prince of Wales at the time, an arbiter of fashion, favoured one with his golfing plus-fours.

Part of the increase in the flat cap’s popularity is that it now comes in a variety of colours, from pink to white and blue. Toffs, of course, do not do pink; they stick to the old sub-fusc tweed, whatever part of the country they are in.