Deborah Orr: While the middle classes are playing at being poor, others have no choice

Nick Clegg has declared that he is feeling "our" financial pain. The leader of the Liberal Democrats explains that he and his wife Miriam are mortgaged "up to the gills", and vouchsafes that Miriam is gravitating away from Ocado and towards Sainsbury's, "just on price".

Clegg is careful to emphasis that "we are very lucky", but insists that his family needs every penny of the two incomes that accrue from his work as a parliamentarian and her work as a lawyer. Savings in the Clegg household include heating the house less "rigorously" than it used to be and ditching the company car in favour of a moped.

Much as I would like to, I find that I am in no position to sneer at Clegg's penny-pinching pretensions. I've also been gripped by a mania for thrift. Ocado deliveries are now a fond memory, and the family car went months ago. While nobody heats their house in the summer anyway, I did, in the spring, reset the timer so that the hot water went on far less frequently. How very smug that made me feel.

I even managed to pre-empt this week's advice from the House of Lords, and then some. The advice that we should stop buying cheap clothes that could be discarded without a backwards glance was not in the least offensive to me. I stopped buying any new clothes at all some way back, and found that my "summer wardrobe" could be augmented perfectly easily with the acquisition of two pairs of gratifyingly cheap plimsolls.

Interestingly, none of this appears to have made any dent in the household finances at all. I can only conclude that in the face of rising prices, I'm walking a little more briskly just to stay still. Even so, I'm keenly aware that I'm merely playing at belt-tightening, and deriving the same sort of pleasure from the activity as Marie Antoinette must have done, when she whiled away her days as a milkmaid. Like Clegg, I have plenty of belt to tighten.

In truth, the affluent have been moaning about the "cost of living" for years now. Even during the maddest and most decadent days of the boom, wealthy people were grumbling away about how the sort of professional job that once guaranteed a place in the country, ponies for the children, and a jolly good cellar now purchased a house in a ghastly part of London – a necessary location for the earning of the really big bucks that had become so inadequate – that Mummy and Daddy would not have dreamed of colonising.

Further, the pressure they felt under to hang on to the meagre advantages of upper-middle-class life meant that the money had to be found for the children to be educated at private schools that were becoming so much more expensive because so many more people could afford them now. Except that back then, no one even bothered to suggest that their complaints were really about the pain of others at all. Their pain was all their own.

I cannot say it is an improvement, this new belief that we are all suffering dreadfully from the credit crunch, and that we're all in this together. It's not a good thing for the wealthy suddenly to start feeling so morally righteous in pleading their own poverty, and listing their modest little savings. It is now considered to be an empathetic thing to do, but really it's like saying that you know what it's like to be blind because you once tried getting from the living room to the bathroom with your eyes closed.

Poor, hapless, Gordon Brown – who is apparently still the Prime Minister – revealed the same sort of thinking when he suggested that rising fuel and food prices would be good for us, because we wasted too much food and fuel anyway. And he wonders why people consider him self-righteous.

It is easy to feel virtuous when one is cutting back on one's luxuries. It is rather less uplifting when one is looking to make savings on a budget that is already highly challenging. For a long time now, people have been snottily insisting that there is no such thing as poverty in Britain any more, just "relative poverty". The idea has now caught on so much that the whole country is now tragically declaring itself to be relatively poor. Even the Queen's not as rich as she used to be. Relative to other monarchs anyway.

* One measure of "relative poverty" is qualification for free school meals. So it should be borne in mind that amid the soaring A-level results, only 176 students qualifying for free school meals in England gained three As. There are no statistics detailing how many of the rest of the students gaining three As did so with the help of private tuition. But with demand for such services at an all-time high, my guess would be quite a few more.

Just an ordinary bankrupt

Kerry Katona, the pop singer turned reality TV star, has not caught on to the fashion for thrift. She has instead been declared bankrupt, having failed to pay £82,000 of her £420,000 tax bill. This is quite an achievement since the woman earns £750,000 a year for her appearances on the Iceland advertisements alone.

I don't suppose the difficulty will do her much harm in the short term. Katona, like Jade Goody, is beloved by her fan base precisely because she is fantastically ordinary but incredibly good at keeping herself in the public eye. Even the threat of bankruptcy helps her in her cause.

For those who admire her, Katona's financial troubles are a sort of proof of her authenticity. A more calculating intelligence would listen to her accountant, but this is just one example of the way in which Katona clearly flounders in a world she is not cut out for.

Katona is paid handsomely to be a fool. Getting herself all bankrupt is part of that weird job.

History repeats itself in Afghanistan

On Just Gordon's "surprise" trip this week to Helmand province in Afghanistan, the press just kept on asking him about ambitious foreign minister David Miliband, who is widely believed to have designs on Brown's job (proof in itself, surely, that he is not fit to govern). Maybe Brown was hoping the surprise would be that the press would for some odd reason refrain from doing so. For a man of such experience he's certainly adept at being mugged by the obvious.

Yet it is little wonder that our great leader was so irritated by Hamid Karzai's comments about ministerial plotting. The Afghan premier was just being friendly, no doubt, and joked about how he has ambitious and grumpy ministers too, though, "not the foreign minister". But Karzai's choice of ministers is not at all a laughing matter.

One of the many, many reasons why Afghanistan is still in such a mess is that the general population is furious about the people Karzai chose and continues to choose to have in his government. The Taliban gained its ascendancy in the country in the first place in part because people became eventually disgusted by the behaviour of many of the Northern Alliance commanders. They were viewed by the coalition forces as allies, but were seen by the Afghanis as men who had become so brutalised by warfare, and so keen to hang on to the territorial gains they had made during the war, that they no longer knew when to stop.

One of the chief gripes that ordinary people have against Karzai – apart from his brother being a regional governor and also a heroin baron – is that he has stuffed his government with those very same people who built their power bases by committing atrocities against Afghanis. It is true that most ordinary Afghanis hate the Taliban. But they are not at all keen on Karzai's government either.

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