The women of Liverpool are finally taking on the snobs zooming in on Ladies Day larks at Aintree

The message is clear. See how the riff-raff can’t be trusted to behave themselves – you give them a taste of the high life and see what they do? They vomit it all over their own shoes

(Shutterstock)

Last week a couple of female journalists from the Liverpool Echo published an open letter to the Daily Mail, informing them that if they couldn’t let the women of Liverpool enjoy themselves at the Aintree races without publishing “worse for wear” photos of them, then they were not welcome in Liverpool any more. I was rather cheered by this, well done Amy Browne and Catherine Murphy, I thought.

Because that trudge up to Liverpool with a big fat sneering lens to zoom in on the most unflattering angles of women in advanced states of inebriation has become an annual event: capturing them in staggering mode, fascinators askew, skirts akimbo with badly fake tanned ankles and plenty of sideboob.

It’s part of the dodgy end of the photojournalism canon; pissed Scouse birds during Grand National week followed by posh home-counties blondes (twins preferably) celebrating their A-level results in August. Other regular photo ops will revolve around the weather; cuties throwing snowballs, or bikini-clad beauties “frolicking” on British beaches on any sunny bank holiday.

All good clean sexist old-fashioned fun.

But the treatment of the Aintree ladies seems particularly pernicious. You can smell the snootiness as cameras snap viciously at vulnerable women who have hit the prosecco too hard and are consequently falling off their stilettos. Go to any society wedding and you would probably see similar levels of pissedness but because they’re not commoners the MailOnline is less interested.

The message is clear. See how the riff-raff can’t be trusted to behave themselves – you give them a taste of the high life and see what they do? They vomit it all over their own shoes.

I assume this coverage of young women drinking in public is deemed of “national interest”, which is why permission doesn’t need to be granted and why girls who thought they’d gone out for a good time are ending up in the “sidebar of shame”. And it is mostly the girls they’re interested in, homing in on the ones who have come the most undone, the ones with their underwear showing, the ones with make-up all over their faces, the ones messily trying to sober up over a burger.

Every year we are invited to this annual scorn-fest, which seems to scream, look at these silly bitches, thinking they’re posh because they dare ape their betters by wearing their ridiculous hats and high street frocks and attending a horse race.

The men tend to get let off the hook, normally drunk in the distance (although this year, in a departure from tradition, a mass brawl of blokes seemed to grab the most attention). The close-ups are usually reserved for the legless ladies, who doubtless wake up mortified the next day and worry themselves sick that any less than flattering online photos could get them into big trouble. Many women can laugh this kind of thing off, but there will be some that burn with shame for months.

The sensible thing to do of course is not to make such a show of yourself in the first place, take it easy with the booze; this event doesn’t need to end in tears. However, for many people in the UK, alcohol and fun go hand in hand, even when you’ve lost your phone and all you really want to do is go home.

In any case, how many of us haven’t behaved badly at times and anyway it’s all so hypocritical. We applaud Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s incredible honesty in the phenomenal Fleabag when she gives us an unflinching account of a woman who wobbles out of control and yet we aren’t meant to have any sympathy for these Liverpudlian lasses on the lash. Is it because they’ve got a funny accent and lip fillers?

Snobbery is a powerful weapon and we are all guilty of wielding it now and then, but to publicly humiliate girls who have done nothing worse than behave foolishly seems unnecessarily punitive.

I think the only way for these girls to get their own back next year is to dress down for Aintree, to turn up, make-up free, hair scraped back and clad in their dowdiest clobber. Forget the plonk for once and arm themselves with flasks of tea and coffee and proceed to bore the photographers into submission. Just don’t give them what they want girls, send them home with nothing, they’ll soon get fed up and stay anyway and then it really will be time to crack open the bubbly.

In the meantime, for anyone who wants a proper gawp at the British at play, then the “warts and all” photographer Martin Parr’s exhibition Only Human is on at the National Portrait gallery.

Could this show be seen as exploitative too? After all, there is much here about class and the Brexit divide. I’d say hopefully not, because behind Parr’s camera lies affection. He hasn’t set out to trap anyone. Parr holds a mirror up to our madness, but he includes all of us in that madness and not just a few girls who lose it at a horse race once a year.