In the London Times, Big Brother was represented by a cartoonist as a lavatory cistern, with a sign under it which read "Now Wash Your Hands Please".

At a dinner party on Thursday night (quick boast there about actually being at a dinner party) there was talk of little else.

But let's not fool ourselves. In all drama on television, fictional or not, the subject is the working class. You don't see the middle class behaving badly on prime time (or on Prime Time). The middle class are voyeurs on working-class life. You don't see too many British or Irish dramas about accountants beating their wives, negligent solicitors, or alcoholic doctors.

And the middle-class motto - "Risk Nothing" - precludes us from appearing on reality TV.

Watching other people bullying is not a pretty sight. Last Friday morning as I looked forward to eviction night, I saw one little boy clatter a smaller boy across the head on their way to school, until the smaller boy turned on his heel and headed off, presumably towards home.

It's not so much fun being a bully either, as the shocked and shamed face of the older boy showed. He knew he'd been seen. We've all been bullies; that's why we are so hard on them.

But this Big Brother thing is different, taking place as it does in the global goldfish bowl. The behaviour of Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O'Meara is reprehensible. Very few people are talking sense about it, enthralled as we are at the prospect of someone else disgracing themselves in public. Only Shilpa Shetty herself, and Sarfaz Manzoor, a British journalist of Pakistani origin, seem to have kept their heads. Shilpa said she didn't think the bullying was racist.

Safraz Manzoor called it "a clash of culture and a clash of class". And here we have the heart of it. Class is the issue that dare not speak its name.

Shilpa's mum is interviewed in a room that is either (a) her living room or (b) the foyer of an international five-star hotel. Jade's mum, Jackiey, has been evicted from the Big Brother house for the unspoken crime of not being sophisticated enough.

This is essentially a female fight.

The supine response of the male Big Brother inmates is just as unedifying as the screaming harpie routine of the females. These big macho men, where have they been through this bullying of an isolated girl?

Shilpa's grace and dignity were bound to guarantee her enemies in the adult playground that is Big Brother. And Jade, Big Brother's most famous baby, who has beaten her notoriety into Euro6m worth of celebrity sponsorship and earned enough to give her mother all the plastic surgery money can buy, has lost everything.

With Jade's first appearance on Big Brother in 2002 unleashed a tide of misogyny and snobbery - as if she was the only person in the world to have thought that Rio de Janeiro was a footballer, which sounds like a perfectly logical conclusion to me. Jade, and millions like her, are cast off by the education system and left where they lie. The fact that, in the intervening five years, Jade has scrambled up what was presumably the only significant opportunity ever given to her is very much to her credit. She turned being a laughing stock and a punch bag for the people who liked to think of themselves as her intellectual superiors into a nice little earner.

Jade is an adult - although only 24.

She has to take responsibility for her own behaviour. (God, we may be closer to the Sunday Independent than we think. ) But we have to take responsibility for our passivity as well. The hate directed at Jade, as a poor white girl, has revealed itself again. On Friday Billy Scanlan in the Daily Star called her "this ignorant pig woman? we told you sow". Let's take some time now, as the nuns used to say, to examine our consciences.