In Devon, several centimetres settled on Dartmoor.It wasn’t all bad news for the bookmakers, however. Millions of Britons awoke yesterday to find snow outside – the nation’s first widespread festive white-out of the new millennium and a performance that puts to shame the 21st century’s only other Christmas Day snowfall, on a piece of northern high ground in 2001.
It was a bad day for the bookies. The snow escaped London, saving them further payouts totalling £1m. William Hill and Ladbrokes are facing payouts of around £500,000 each.”I don’t think we’ve seen widespread snowfall since before the millennium, so we mustn’t be too Scrooge-like,” said the bookies’ spokesman, Graham Sharpe.Orkney islanders enjoyed the best of the falls, waking up to find a 14cm snowfall lying deep in places, but a picture postcard white Christmas was enjoyed across much of Scotland, Northern Ireland, north Wales and parts of north-west England. Warning that extremists could threaten peace in a multicultural society, she said: “It is vitally important that we all should participate and co-operate for the sake of the wellbeing of the whole community.”. The Queen, in her Christmas broadcast, appealed for greater tolerance between Britain’s various faiths ­ bringing a warm welcome from Muslim and Jewish leaders. He also said basic principles of “justice and liberty” for all were being sacrificed for security.

He said people were right to anxious about terrorism, but suggested the real risk of attack was less than the public was lead to believe.Meanwhile, the head of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, criticised using “billions of pounds” for conflicts in the Middle East instead of “bringing people out of dire poverty, malnourishment and disease”. Britain’s religious leaders condemned the failure of wealthy nations to spend enough on tackling poverty around the world while spending too much on fighting terrorism.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, used his Christmas sermon yesterday to accuse world leaders of wrongly focusing too heavily on combating terrorism while failing to meet their promise to cut global poverty by half by 2015. And where do you people come from?”b) Stop and ask them if Burberry does a wallet for your credit cardsc) Cross the road – just in cased) Ask them if they know how to spell Burberrye) Reach inside your pocket for a knife3 In your view, no one is well read until they have:a) Studied that week’s Tatlerb) Learnt Das Kapital off by heartc) It’s more important to enjoy reading than to be “well-read”d) Consumed all this year’s Booker shortliste) Mastered the instructions on a packet of Angel Delight4 You refer to the room at the front of the house as:a) Part of the south wingb) The lounge – and proud of itc) The living roomd) The sitting roome) The Dolby surround-sound home cinema. “This beautiful, non-academic person is taking over the Today programme. People will be getting in a frightful state.”How snobbish are you? Take our test1 It is honorary degree day at your local university and you are chancellor. Whom do you seat on your right hand?a) The Earl of Borsetshire, whose sister you once met in Biarritzb) Harry ‘Monster’ Hutchins, Australian beer magnate who is funding the new Chair in Barbecue Studiesc) Dr Hilary Bookworm, the working-class woman from your town who is now a Nobel Prize-winning physicistd) Jonah Plagiarise, new darling of London’s literary scenee) Wayne Hubcap, top scorer for your local Premiership side2 You see someone walking towards you wearing Burberry Your first reaction is to:a) Walk up and say: “Oh, hello.

But she has also demanded airtime for serious items on obesity – she was once branded the Duchess of Pork before famously triumphing in the US by making a fortune as the face and body of WeightWatchers.Intellectual snobs may be rather alarmed at her guest editorship, but Jilly Cooper supports her right to attack snobbery. The nouveau riche are the new snobs.”The Duchess of York has long been seen by some as a victim of snobbery herself. Lord Charteris – Provost of Eton College and a friend of the late Queen Mother – once called the duchess “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”. “There is no longer any room for Nancy Mitford’s kind of snobbery in this type of society,” he said. “Those without power are now more likely to criticise them [the upper classes] than to defer to them.”Cary Cooper, Professor of Psychology at Lancaster University, said: “Snobbery used to be the preserve of the upper middle classes trying to protect their status Now what is significant is how much money you have.

“It’s very difficult to define exactly what snobbery means now. It’s like the word ‘elite’, which to me is a compliment and to everybody else is a term of abuse. It’s one of those Humpty Dumpty words,” he said, referring to Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass. “It means ‘whatever I choose it to mean’.”John Scott, president of the British Sociological Association, who has conducted research into the British class system, believes increasing snobbery in Britain stems from the insecurity of the upper and middle classes who fear their position is under threat.

“Rock stars are having parties where the people who serve the canap?are told not to look the celebrity guests in the eye,” he said “A peer of the realm would never have got away with that. The staff would have walked out.”The more fluid a society, the more rampant snobbery is,” he added. “People are constantly searching for reassurance about their positions – even more so now than in Queen Victoria’s time.”They may not be kow-towing to peers any more, but they’re kow-towing to footballers or rock stars or celebrities.”It’s mutated; it’s a more variegated snobbery now.”Jilly Cooper, whose novel Class summed up the mood of the Eighties, agrees that snobbery is more pervasive and varied than ever. She particularly attacked television’s makeover programmes for their sneery opinions, singling out Trinny and Susannah, the stars of What Not to Wear, as “a very thinly disguised form of class snobbery”.”Have you seen these programmes that tell you how to sell your house?” she complained.