big house, the nice car, the rich and powerful friends..." (the Blairs, for example).

Toynbee has returned this loathing in spades, as in her churlish gloating over the death of her old enemy Auberon Waugh, whom she characterised as "effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist".

Shockingly, in the context of this mutual enmity, a couple of years ago Greg Clark, the Tory MP for Tunbridge Wells, suggested to David Cameron that their party might usefully replace the Churchillian notion of "absolute" poverty with the Toynbee-ish one of "relative" poverty (ie, an inability to afford consumer durables). In a rare display of graciousness, Toynbee took the suggestion as a compliment.

There were those on the Left who were infuriated by this, some of whom never liked her anyway. There are comrades who will not forgive her for deserting Labour in the 1980s - she stood as the SDP candidate for Lewisham East in 1983.

There are those who take this as just one

example of her political opportunism and naked worship of power. They point to her slavish devotion first to Blair ("the best government of my lifetime"), then to Brown - and now, apparently, to Miliband.

Others object to the fact that, though she is a fervent champion of state education, two of her three children were partly educated at private schools. This, of course, is a charge that has justly been levelled at many figures on the Left, but none more deservingly than Toynbee. What this boils down to, surely, is that she is hateful because she is rich and posh - exactly the qualities she so hates in her own enemies.

To her credit, though, she is not only impervious to the criticisms of her many foes, but positively welcomes their dislike. Now 61, she has seen off enough of them in her time, and will no doubt see off many more. And besides being exemplarily redoubtable she is also, partly because of her own lack of humour, one of the great comic figures of our time.
Polly Toynbee on rich people