At the Tory conference, a few acres of of newsprint were dedicated to what the Tory leader’s wife wore. Apparently, it was a £65 dress from M&S, which she paired with some £29 shoes from Zara.

Goodness me. Who cares? I mean, you expect people in the public eye in receipt of a pretty decent wage to be turned out nicely. And on occasions such as this where you know people will be taking pictures and you can be pretty certain your photo will show up in prominent places in national newspapers, it’s entirely acceptable to make sure you’re wearing something nice. It’s also fine, I would put to you, for people in this situation to spend a reasonable amount of money on clothes. Mrs Cameron was being set up to contrast with Mrs Brown, who’d spent rather more on her togs. If both women looked nice, and neither was dripping with jewels, I don’t really care how much either woman spent on her frock.

Ultimately, it’s pretty unimportant – almost as unimportant, I’d say as that thorny issue of how long people clap for at conferences. But for some reason, the national newspapers think it matters that DC got a few more minutes and a few more standing ovations than GB, despite the fact that they are wholly different audiences and no-one but no-one in the country cares whether Labour loyalists are loyaller than Tory loyalists.

Then today I read something even more daft in the Mirror.

Apparently the process by which Mrs Cameron obtained her £65 dress didn’t go quite the way you’d think. I’d imagined, foolishly, that Mrs Cameron went into a shop, looked at a few dresses on their hangers on the shop floor, tried a few on until she found one that flattered her, then took it to the cash desk and paid for it.

If the Mirror is to be believed, what actually happened is that Mrs Cameron wanted to wear a particularly rare M&S dress, as modelled on the television by Myleene Klass (who she?). In order to find it, her people spoke to M&S’s people, who issued an order to every M&S in the country to find precisely the one dress. This entailed dozens of staff across the nation in including M&S’s beknighted CX in the pursuit of one dress. When that proved impossible, they found a dress that didn’t fit, and paid a dressmaker conceivably more than the dress cost to make it fit.

Was this all done in a vapid game of oneupmanship between two camps, using women’s dresses as a skirmish in class warfare? If so, what a horribly pointless waste of human endeavour, and what a sad indictment of the state of political discourse in our country.