Paper Monitor
10:34 UK time, Friday, 24 December 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Who would have thought that a fingernail could tell us so much?
While most onlookers were studying the sparkly engagement ring sported by the soon-to-be-betrothed Zara Phillips, it was up to the Daily Mail to tear Fleet Street's most watchful eye away from the glitz and direct it further down Zara's digit to a far more revealing spot.
The Queen's grand-daughter did not, notes columnist Jan Moir, have time for a manicure. Her "paws looked as if she had just mucked out the stable, using her fingernails as shovels".
In contrast, says Moir, Kate Middleton had "a manicure that was born to rule".
Paper Monitor considered interjecting at this point, just to note in Zara's defence that Kate hasn't been winning Olympic and world medals in equestrian sport. The last time PM checked, the world of PR wasn't such a messy business.
But to stop Moir when is doing the world a disservice. Let's just enjoy her wonderful sense of understatement:
The manicured and the non-manicured brides-to-be spoke volumes about class and aspiration, about the suburbs that seethe with ambition and country houses stuffed with the idle and the noble. Especially when, as in this instance, the unpolished and the coarse is dragged into the vortex of the royal family.Frankly, it proved the old truth - if you are really rich and posh, you don't have to bother yourself. It is only the aspiring and the determined, rest of us who have to make the effort, day after day, coat after coat of Jezebel Red or Mink Muffs.
Mink??
Paper Monitor [face now a Jezebel red with sartorial humiliation] is still wearing musk rat.
How embarrassing...
The 
