Was it 'Toiletgate' that done for Kate?

The British class system is alive and kicking if some of the reports about the break-up of Prince William and Kate Middleton are true, says Jasper Gerard.

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." So ventured Shaw in Pygmalion, and, if reports are to be believed - and perhaps we should not take them too seriously - Prince William's now ex-girlfriend, Kate Middleton, must have, on occasion, been made to feel rather like Shaw's Covent Garden flower seller ensnared on the thorns of polite society.

For just as Eliza was lampooned for her non-U utterances, so apparently was Miss Middleton - although not for any society gaffes of her own but for those apparently made by her mother, a former air stewardess, who not only, we are told, addressed the Queen with the phrase "Pleased to meet you" rather than the accepted "How do you do?", but was also known to have let slip a word toffs consider quite the ghastliest blasphemy: toilet.

As a faux pas it was up there with a convivial George Brown, then foreign secretary, asking the Archbishop of Lima if "she" cared for a dance. It is hard to imagine a blunder more guaranteed to hasten Miss Middleton's return to the (middle class) singles circuit, short of venturing to the Queen: "Hello ducky, nice lounge you've got 'ere, mind if I kick the corgi off the settee and eat me tea in front of Celebrity Wife Swap?"

The prince, like anyone else, is entitled to restore his bachelor status without public explanation. And we can dismiss tabloid attempts to turn an everyday story of "young man graduates and then dumps girlfriend" into the gravest constitutional disaster since the abdication. Yet if the public decides "Toiletgate" has even the whiff of truth about it, its bad odour will cause many to hold their nose.

For it would suggest Britain's "classless society" remains almost as much a chimera as in Shaw's time.

A no-nonsense bride hailing from mining stock would have been the Royal Family's greatest publicity coup since the Queen Mother looked the East End in the eye; greater even than the Prince of Wales's marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. Indeed, just as it often helps Conservative leaders - Margaret Thatcher, John Major - to have sprung from humble origins, so the Royal Family is damaged, not by appearing too "smart", but too "common".

Today, the worst charge that can be levelled at anyone is privilege, which is why David Cameron was so unsettled by the emergence of that old Bullingdon Club photo.

Certainly, Miss Middleton would have gone down better with William's future subjects - many of whom quite enjoy buying commemorative plates from Woolworth's - than would some haughty jewel-encrusted Euro-princess with 26 names and half of Bavaria.

The irony is that the Royal Family - which has met more non-U folk than any clan in Britain - has a pretty good record on class. Ever since Queen Victoria emerged from mourning to tour, the Windsors have had an instinctive understanding that they must connect with the people and share their values; popular consent, not divine right, would ensure royal survival.

Even the Duke of Edinburgh, known for his gaffes, avoids public displays of snobbery. In fact, with her Tupperware cereal boxes, sensible shoes and thrifty patching of worn carpets, the Queen is sometimes joked about in self-consciously smart circles as being not entirely top drawer herself. Personally, I find it hard to believe she would turn against anyone for committing the supposed calumny of saying "pleased to meet you".

If Carole Middleton, Kate's mother, did employ such a greeting, the Queen would surely have taken it as it was meant: a friendly courtesy from one not sufficiently privileged to have enjoyed an expensive education.

Unfortunately, some throwbacks, whose life is devoted to whispering in royal ears - whether in Balmoral or Boujis - lack that important royal insight. In the film The Queen, the Tony Blair character puts down the phone on some strangulated courtier and shakes his puzzled head: "Who are these people?" In recent years, genius - or at least mild intelligence - rather than genealogy has determined royal appointments, so there are far fewer tweedy bag carriers, such as the late Lord Charter is who dismissed Sarah Ferguson as "vulgar, vulgar, vulgar".

Yet in the upper class social circles to which royalty still gravitates more than it should, snobbery remains rife. This unjustified sense of superiority found expression in Alan Clark's notorious put-down of Michael Heseltine as a man who "bought his own furniture".

If they can be judged by their nightclub antics, Prince William's friends seem to be an unthinking clique that might be called yobbish if it were not so monied. At Eton and now in the officers' mess, the prince will have been exposed to a good deal of snobbery, often emanating from those whose parents are plutocratic rather than aristocratic and who therefore feel the need to emphasise their supposed grandeur by deriding others.

The prince's friends reportedly jokingly whispered "doors to manual" in Miss Middleton's presence, a cheap reference to her mother's erstwhile career as an air hostess; it would show how little they understand the interests of monarchy if they were trying to push Kate out of the royal plane in the belief that the Queen of England still has to be blue-blooded.

Ever since 1832 when an uppity middle class had the temerity to demand the vote, the upper class has viewed the next class down with suspicion, even fear. Indeed, for all Marx's class war plotting, the most heated class aggro has always been between the landed and the commercial-professional class.

For the proletariat could be romanticised as salt of the earth that knew its place and put the Colgate on the royal toothbrush; but the aspirational middle class was - is - a threat. (And the Middletons, with a comfortable house in a village outside Reading and a company called Party Pieces, is nothing if not middle class. Gosh, they are even "in trade".)

For its part, the middle class has always contained those who secretly aspire to promotion to a higher league. For all their attacks on aristocratic languor, it was a section of the middle class that devoured Nancy Mitford's essay on U and non-U, searching for etiquette tips.

You see, we are a nation of social aspirants, of Hyacinth Bouquets, and press outrage at Prince William's dumping of Miss Middleton might owe something to resentment that one of its own class shall not, after all, ride in a royal carriage to St. Paul's.

Of all the feverish speculation about what the Queen thought of Miss Middleton, the more plausible suggestion is that Her Majesty had mild, scarcely expressed, reservations that the young woman's behaviour was rather too aristocratic: for instead of using her degree to carve out a career Kate Middleton wafted around parties, shopped, enjoyed regular holidays, and only recently took a part-time job at the periphery of the fashion industry.

If anything, the disappointment might have been that Kate, having acquired Sloaney friends, royal boyfriend and flat in Chelsea, had displayed all too little of her parents' middle-class work ethic.

If members of the prince's circle did make all those snobbish remarks - and we should remember that is an "if" - we should hope they are now being told with appropriate royal bluntness that such ugly attitudes are no longer acceptable. Snobs can be re-educated.

I had lunch with Alan Clark shortly before he died and as he devoured a starchy pudding, he reflected: "The older I get, the more I am drawn back to my family's working-class roots." For Clark's family - like all families at some stage - had bought its own furniture. If royal hangers-on reflect on that, we might finally be able to leave Shaw's terrible dictum behind.

Daily Telegraph