ninme

The Times - Katie Price: why was I snubbed by the polo snobs?
I know far more about horses than the toffs who were made welcome, by Katie Price

I didn’t want to go to Windsor to meet royalty. I’ve met the Prince of Wales and the Queen before. I don’t need to be photographed with the A-list, I’ve met quite enough celebrities. I wanted to watch the matches and give my family a treat.

It’s pure snobbery. However good a horsewoman I may be, I’m also a glamour model. That embarrassed the organisers. I paid Chinawhite £6,000 for my table, but my manager was told that I was not the sort of person they wanted. Eliza Doolittle went to the races with Henry Higgins after a few elocution lessons, In Pretty Woman Julia Roberts went to the polo straight from Sunset Boulevard, but in the 21st century we have become even more class-ridden. Unless you are a toff or an aspiring actress, they don’t want you.

Polo should be for people who love horses, not a media charade. It should be about the sport. Horses are a wonderful hobby, one that gets you outside and keeps you fit. They should be for everyone - little girls, glamour girls, working-class girls like me. No one should be excluded.

The Times - Katie Price is right
Jordan is correct to challenge snobs guarding the polo marquee

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.

Yeah, I’m sorry, but if they’re going to have a tent sponsored by Chinawhite, and then be all snobby about it, then, yeah. That’s ridiculous. You’ve lost the right to have standards (and sorry but I’ve seen the celebrity pictures from that match, and, uh, what standards?).