Toynbee: the great comic figure of our age

None of us," boomed Polly Toynbee the other day, in her now famous attack on the super-rich, "like to feel guilty about our comfortable lives." Like much of what she writes, this is not altogether true. It probably is true of many of the super-rich, but as the Guardian's leading columnist - as the living embodiment, indeed, of the Guardianista spirit, of whom even that paper's editor is said to be terrified - Toynbee knows perfectly well that her painfully liberal readers like nothing better than to feel guilty about their comfortable lives.

One suspects that what she really means by "None of us" - which is properly a singular, by the way - is "I". Thanks to her guilt-inducing journalism and books, she is herself comparatively rich and comfortable, with a house in Clapham and a villa in Italy. And, as a daughter of Philip Toynbee and

granddaughter of Arnold, she is also quite posh. But - unless one takes a psychoanalytic approach, and views her entire oeuvre as an act of expiation - she stoutly refuses to feel guilty about it.

There is in this a strong whiff of smugness and hypocrisy which, combined with an almost heroic lack of any sense of humour, has made her widely disliked.

Her enemies are actually legion. As a devout atheist, and President of the British Humanist Association, in 2004 she was voted Most Islamophobic Media Personality by the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

She is naturally loathed by such right-wingers as Boris Johnson, who wrote that she incarnated "all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain", and Paul Dacre, who objected to her second marriage (after the death of her first husband Peter Jenkins of the Guardian) to David Walker (also of the Guardian), who already had a wife and children. Dacre printed a piece by the spurned wife: "You had the power," she wrote, "the glamour, the