Class snobs - they are just so yesterday

On and on they go, the exes. The idea of moving on – of "living in the now", as it is called – seems alien to them. When Marianne Faithfull was given a chance to reminisce with Sue MacGregor on Radio 4, she chose to have a go at her ex-squeeze, Mick Jagger. Asked about Jagger's knighthood, Marianne confided that "he always wanted that so much – that's why I'm so compassionate about it". Drawing a slightly surprising comparison to Noel Coward, she added that both Mick and Noel were "tremendous snobs".

Not so long ago another ex, Ian McEwan's first wife, was similarly compassionate when her former husband was made a CBE. Ian's two great ambitions had been to receive a gong at the Palace and to appear on Desert Island Discs, said Mrs McEwan. Now he could rest easy.

These remarks, presumably designed to hurt and embarrass, are in fact distinctly out of date. Honours are no longer a source of embarrassment. Melvyn Bragg is "His Lordship". Harold Pinter has become a Companion of Honour without being accused of selling out to the establishment. A few eyebrows were raised in lefty circles, it is true, when that great enragé Michael Horovitz accepted an OBE for services to poetry and general bloody-mindedness, but he, too, has bowed his head to the Queen without compromising his radical credentials.

Those who object to the honours system see it as part of the class structure, an emblem of British divisiveness, but the fact is that the social landscape has changed since the days when Mick was partying with Marianne, Ian was at the University of East Anglia, sitting at the feet of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, and Michael was romping about the stage at the Poetry Olympics with Allen Ginsberg. Class snobbery has given way to other forms of social division, offering us new and different ways to feel superior to others. In the 1980s snobbery was based on how much you earned. Later, when lifestyle magazines began to exert their terrible grip, an endless variety of sub-categories of snootiness were on offer – food snobbery, fashion snobbery, travel snobbery, restaurant snobbery, job snobbery.

Today the obsession with celebrity has more or less done for class. The press will go through the motions, referring to Tim the Toff on Big Brother, a revival of that classic of lower suburban snobbery, Abigail's Party, can play to packed houses, and, rather shockingly, the memoirs of the pig-tailed ninny of Longleat, the Marquess of Bath, can be commissioned by John McVicar, who seems to have become a publisher. But for most people the question is not "What's his background?" or "Who does she think she is?", but simply "Are they famous?".

Snobbery of the traditional kind has become a sign of stupidity, even of psychological dysfunction. The woman who, I was told not so long ago, was physically unable to go to bed with a man who referred to the toilet rather than the loo is no longer seen to be amusing or superior, but is an object of curiosity and mild pity.

In his recent book, Snobbery: The American Version, Joseph Epstein argues that the idea of family background as a benchmark of social worthiness, which was established in the late 19th century, died out about a century later when, quite suddenly, no one was sure what to be snobbish about.

All the same, there are, according to Epstein, still areas where status-obsession has a hold, notably in the worlds of academia and the arts. A certain kind of overt snobbery has always played a part in the literary world – think of Henry James, Proust and Oscar Wilde; listen to Gore Vidal when he is next in town – but there is also a more subtle kind that influences the way certain writers are treated.

Rather bravely, Epstein suggests that Susan Sontag's inflated reputation as a novelist, much garlanded by heavyweight reviewers and award-winning committees, has less to do with her writing than with her position as an eminent contributor to the New York Review of Books, "journal of choice of those happy few (hundred thousand) left-leaning, right-living intellectuals, happily safe atop a cloud of nearly celestial snobbery."

Anyone who has attended a gathering of left-leaning, right-living intellectuals in England – at an A-list book launch, for example, or a big-names-only university seminar – will know this to be a perceptive view. Where has snobbery gone? It has become intellectual snobbery, a division between those who regard themselves as the intelligentsia and the rest of the world.

That kind of weary, dead-eyed arrogance exists easily alongside its old-fashioned, class-based cousin –you will find remarkably few working-class accents or black skins in publishing offices or art galleries – but the main point of it is its unquestioning intellectual exclusiveness.

So this, perhaps, is where the next ex of an esteemed public figure should direct her barbs – at the Lord and Lady Snooties who move through the comfy, enclosed world of the British intelligentsia.

terblacker@aol.com