Think Katie Price's decision to pierce her daughter's ears was 'tacky' and 'common'? Welcome to classism

“I’m famous for my tits,” she once said to a reporter, which enraged everyone, because isn’t that what we’re supposed to be able to say behind her back?

Katie Price came under fire this week for piercing her daughter Bunny's ears

“She looks so tacky”: it’s a loaded phrase, isn’t it? You’d probably reserve it for the very worst of transgressions: a colleague showing off both her legs and her cleavage at a formal event; a woman at the school gate in pyjama bottoms. Not just any pyjama bottoms, either, but the ones that say “Juicy” on the bum in diamante detail. And not just any school run, but one for four different kids from four different dads. Doesn’t it make your toes curl? Isn’t it all so, well, common?

If you need an outlet for your raging classism, then you can’t get more stereotypically “common” than Katie Price. A former glamour model (a woman profiting from her sexuality? Revolting!) with three marriages under her belt (how unrefined), an unabashed fondness for surgically enhanced breasts (why can’t she make herself look more natural?) and a tendency to voice her opinions loudly, proudly and publicly – the artist formerly known as Jordan is everything our culture loves to hate.

Price has broken the rules so many times it’s a wonder she’s survived. She admitted to having an abortion during her twenties. She did interviews about her Botox regimen. She had frank discussions with her then-husband, Peter Andre, about their sex life – and sometimes even re-enacted sex positions with him, while fully clothed – in front of the TV cameras.

In 2006, The Scotsman ran a piece about her including a sentence that remains permanently etched in my mind: “Underneath the superficiality of a woman who is so spoilt that she sneers at the wrong car, who uses sex as a weapon, who inflates and deflates her breasts as if they were attached to a balloon pump, is a woman who has not had an easy life, however much money she has made.” In one fell swoop, this delivered everything that’s wrong with Katie Price: she’s unapologetically materialistic; unapologetically sexual; unapologetically in charge of her own body; and unapologetically rich on top of it all. Surely – surely! – she must be unhappy?

The idea that a working-class woman with all of those attributes could be both happy and successful goes against everything the Establishment stands for. “I’m famous for my tits,” she once said to a reporter, which enraged everyone, because isn’t that what we’re supposed to be able to say behind her back? Endlessly, infuriatingly, she takes charge of the narrative which is supposed to be used to denigrate her.

This week it’s not Price who “looks so tacky”, but her 18-month-old daughter Bunny. On an Instagram feed that featured pictures of Price and her family, the toddler was pictured wearing small gold studs in her newly pierced ears. Everyone was sanctimoniously thrilled. Wasn’t it confirmation, after all, that this chav-done-good, this new-money-mummy, couldn’t help but show her true colours in the world of the sophisticated super-rich?

Fashion is perhaps the last bastion of acceptable classism, where Ugg boots and tracksuit bottoms, which mark you out as a Sloane Ranger in some well-heeled districts, are immediately held as proof you’re a lazy, incompetent skiver on benefits in others. Ostentatious jewellery, high ponytails, designer bags: if you come from a council estate, not a country estate, you wear them at your peril.

When Angelina Jolie, daughter of the eminent Jon Voight and firmly installed Establishment figure, pierces her children’s ears (as she has done, as Price herself pointed out), she’s making a family decision that’s absolutely nothing to do with us. When Katie Price does it, she’s a gobby little commoner showing her roots.

The criticism of Price this week is nothing other than the continuation of a narrative that’s followed her throughout her career. She’s in the wrong place; she’s stumbled into the millionaires’ room in a haze of sparkly pink extroversion. And if somebody won’t show her the door, then she should politely let herself out round the back.

Except the woman we know as Katie has never played along. Where so many would self-efface, shrink away, become dejected and demoralised, she just keeps placing herself in the one place a working-class woman is never meant to be: centre stage. And long may she stay there.