If you’re posh, the least you could do is feel embarrassed about it

I burst into flames whenever I get called posh. I would rather dig myself a very deep hole and pull the dirt over my head – but Rishi Sunak isn’t blushing. He should

So there she goes, “Mad Nad” Dorries, furiously flouncing off towards her sunset talkshow slot at TalkTV’s London studios, aiming both barrels squarely over her shoulder.

The presenter formerly known as the Rt Hon Nadine is seething that two “posh boys”, Rishi Sunak and his adviser James Forsyth, were behind moves to “duplicitously and cruelly” block her from getting a peerage.

“It kind of breaks my heart, because this story is about a girl from Liverpool who worked every day of her life, had something offered to her that people from that background don’t get offered, removed by two privileged posh boys who went to Winchester and Oxford”, she told Piers Morgan on his TalkTV show.

“Taken away, duplicitously and cruelly. It was upsetting, and it was upsetting for everybody who thinks they could be that person.”

This is almost a very good point. It’s certainly vintage Dorries. She has previously lashed out at “arrogant posh boys” like George Osborne and David Cameron who didn’t know the price of milk (which they didn’t). But it’s odd to hear her letting her old boss Boris Johnson (who also didn’t) off the hook.

The ex-culture secretary, who grew up on a council estate in Liverpool, claimed Johnson’s own background is not a fair comparison because he attended Eton on a scholarship and has “no money”. Dorries is never short of a frothy word or two, having shifted an impressive 2.5 million of her steamy novels, but surely even she must see that this is total fiction.

Perhaps the only thing that Johnson and his former chancellor have in common is that they are unapologetically, exuberantly, irrepressibly posh. Rishi, headboy at the now £45,936 per annum Winchester School, proudly calls his alma mater “a very old boarding school but an absolutely marvellous place”.

Meanwhile, King’s Scholar Boris Johnson, a man the Labour grandee Andrew Adonis calls “the Prime Etonian”, sprays Greek and Latin bon mots around like confetti. As foreign secretary, he once had to be stopped from quoting Rudyard Kipling’s colonial ode The Road to Mandalay at a sacred Buddhist site in Myanmar by the mortified UK ambassador Andrew Patrick.

What’s true is that they are two very different types of upper echelon: Rishi is a slick and shiny millennial golden boy, rising smoothly from Winchester to Lincoln College, Oxford, to Goldman Sachs and then to the Treasury, a billionaire who calls himself “professional middle class” and is happily gladhanded by the wealthy he makes wealthier.

You imagine he’d pay the bill at dinner without even glancing at it. Johnson is an old school “chumocrat”, his father Stanley is a former Tory MEP whose grandfather was the last sultan of Turkey’s interior minister; his mother Charlotte was the artist daughter of a president of the European Commission of Human Rights. He is a man who lives cheek by jowl on his immensely bankable reputation. At that same dinner, you suspect he’d have forgotten his wallet.

But neither is ashamed to be called posh. Not in the same way that, say, I’m embarrassed to be called posh, having attended the very expensive Westminster School in London. They are “live your truth” posh — Lulu Lytle golden-wallpaper posh, £3,500 Henry Herbert suit posh — in a manner that is oddly in fashion, despite a cost of living crisis. Oddly, it works for them.

I burst into flames whenever I get called posh. I would rather dig myself a very deep hole and pull the dirt over my head than have someone call me what I am – which just goes to show what a very well chosen broadside Dorries has levelled. Nothing stings the guilt-ridden posh boy like being told he’s a posh boy. It’s why Rupert Murdoch is willing to pay Dorries and her £6,000 diamond earrings the big bucks – you’ll like her when she’s angry. And she’s very, very angry.

But the greatest trick Johnson – and Sunak after him – ever played on the world was styling out being super rich. A decade of Tory rule will do that. Our columnist Oliver Keens recently wrote about the curious doublethink Londoners practise about being posh – caviar is obviously posh, but are olives? Sometimes. Is a peerage? What about a TV show? – as an agonised middle-class Britain ties itself into a privileged pretzel. So you watch Succession but want to abolish billionaires? What do we even do with that?

It’s a happy irony that parliament’s own privileges committee will ring the final bell of judgement on Boris Johnson’s misdeeds. It would be a happier irony still if his Uxbridge seat were filled by Danny Beales, the truly impressive Labour councillor, an “anti-Boris” who beat homelessness to make a living changing people’s lives. This country is bursting with other stories yearning to be told from the highest office in the land.

But the staggeringly wealthy calling the staggeringly wealthy staggeringly wealthy? Now that’s rich.