Our drink laws are driven by middle-class hypocrites | Catherine Bennett | Comment is free | The Observer

Confronted with a nation of drunks who seem inclined to get ever drunker, Nice, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, has come up with various temperance schemes. It wants GPs to ask more questions. Better still, it says, would be an increase in the price of alcohol, since that is "likely to be more effective in reducing alcohol-related harm among the population as a whole".

On the other hand, look at the Duchess of York. The duchess says she is broke. "I absolutely have not a pot to piss in," is her analysis of the situation. And yet, when the News of the World filmed the duchess offering to sell access to her ex-husband for half-a-million pounds and failing to spot, in the midst of this transaction, that the buyer was a famous undercover reporter, she now says she had "been drinking" and continued to drink as the deal was completed.

The newspaper's video suggests that, although she was not close to being classically hog-whimpering, the duchess had certainly reached the earlier, possibly more dangerous stage of slurring fluent, unstoppable rubbish, to wit: "I'm a complete aristocrat. Love that don't you? I love it. It's tremendously fabulous. But I've never admitted that to anyone by the way." It is probably fortunate, in the circumstances, that she did not discover strong feelings for the mystery tycoon or confess that, in some important personal respects, Andrew had never been able to do much for her.

Afterwards, telling Oprah Winfrey about the role alcohol had played in her downfall, the duchess used an interesting, and to some of us unfamiliar expression: "I was not in my right place." If, as it appears, she has found a new idiom for intoxication, then at least some good has come out of this dreadful situation. Although the English are to drunkenness vocabulary what the Inuits are to snow, heavy usage does tend to exhaust the supply and "I was not in my right place" has an air of injured dignity, suffused with pious exculpation, which cannot be said of rat-arsed, legless, paralytic, wasted, pissed, smashed or even, as Christopher Hitchens phrases it, "flown with wine".

When you think of her background, though, the duchess was being hard on herself. If she was not in her right place after a bottle or so, you could argue that her late grandmother-in-law, the Queen Mother, spent much of her life adrift on a remote planet. Always admired for her ready smile and preternaturally high spirits, it was not until after her death that much of the Queen Mother's endless vivacity could confidently be attributed to the steady absorption of gin, interrupted only by sleep, champagne and meal times at which, as her biographer William Shawcross put it, "the wine was poured with generous aplomb by her uniformed stewards".

Small wonder that her daughter Princess Margaret continued this tradition, though with more generous aplomb than was eventually good for her, and that her grandson and great-grandsons still seem unwilling always to heed official Know Your Limits advice. In her new autobiography, Laura Bush recalls Prince Charles's request for two glasses of ice to be supplied for himself and Camilla Parker Bowles before they joined a receiving line: "The prince removed a flask from his pocket and added to each a small splash of what I presume was straight gin."

How much more would alcohol have to cost to deter this kind of drinker, along with bourgeois dipsos who, research suggests, increasingly aspire to drink as if they, too, were candidates for the Bullingdon club? It seems a little negligent to allow the middle classes to drink themselves to death purely because £4.50 bottles of wine are unlikely to be a disincentive. And even if, as Kingsley Amis once said of whale hunting, that seems a good way of using them up, it is surely unfair that modest but hard-up drinkers should be penalised for the surge in bingeing for which the Labour government, cheap alcohol and the strategems of a cunning, over-indulged drinks industry are widely thought to be responsible.

Without, say, 24-hour licences, happy hours and vertical drinking, how would those staggering, semi-dressed girls whose fate now obsesses the Daily Mail ever have discovered that they shared this interest with the late Queen Mother? To say nothing of Alan Clark, Roger Scruton and, of course, Christopher Hitchens, who argues that "no better form of sodality has ever been devised". And, he agrees with the Mail, no worse form of sorority. "It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man. I don't know why this is true but it is."

It is also worse to see ordinary people drunk than privileged ones. I don't know why this is true, but it must be, given that the proposals for government action seem to have been prompted principally by a democratisation of heavy drinking, particularly where women are concerned, rather than any genuine interest in stamping it out. There has not even, amazingly, been a law to prohibit drink-driving completely, presumably because brewers argue that the survival of country pubs should come before that of human beings. And far from prompting remedial action, the scale of cross-country bacchanalia following the introduction of Tessa Jowell's "continental cafe culture" has led only to a reinterpretation of drunk and disorderly so as to make it closer to drunk and homicidal.

This fitful interest in controlling intake and the fact that heavier alcohol consumption has been tolerated in the past suggest, to some, that the government and media are merely acting out another great British tradition: that of alcohol-inspired moral panics. In a fascinating paper on binge drinking, the academics Virginia Berridge, Betsy Thom and Rachel Herring show that heavy drinking, along with disapproval of it, goes back at least to the 12th century, when William of Malmesbury wrote of the English: "Drinking is a universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days… they were accustomed to eat until they became surfeited, and drink until they were sick."

Plainly, the Daily Mail's gutter-bound slappers and distraught female over-achievers are only beginning to catch up with ancestors whose crapulence, Malmesbury claimed, cost us the Battle of Hastings (the Normans having spent the previous night, continental-style, nursing a single Ricard).

But as Mr Hitchens says, and sometimes demonstrates, our national habit is not always pretty. And as Nice explains, aplomb can be an appalling drain on the health service. Price fixing looks unfair and, on current form, there appears to be little appetite for punishing drinkers who enjoy re-enacting the Brideshead vomit scene in their local town centre. What now? The last big temperance movement had Methodism, public decency, the cautionary tale of Eric, or Little by Little. But we have something they didn't: a woman who makes Gin Lane resemble a Sure Start centre. If the true story of Sarah Ferguson does not inspire a generation of children to sign the pledge, then nothing will.