Wayne Rooney, on his knees. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for Sony

Wayne Rooney’s alleged bit on the side, Jenny Thompson, came from a solidly middle-class background – the British media is aghast!

When Manchester United football star Wayne Rooney allegedly cheated on his pregnant wife Coleen with “privately-educated” prostitute Jenny Thompson, chances are he never thought that Jenny’s parents would get involved. But they have. The “well-heeled” pair cut short their holiday in Portugal and came back to the UK early to issue an apology to Wayne’s wife. “Mortified dad” Hamish Thompson told The Sun, which has had a field day with the story, “This may sound somewhat hollow, but my wife and I would never condone what has or may have happened.”

The fact that the elder Thompson even has a forum to apologise to Coleen is down to the UK media’s obsession with the fact that Jenny Thompson, also known as “Juici Jeni”, came from a middle-class background. Cue horrified gasps and sputtering moral outrage from The Sun and The Daily Mail.

Bel Mooney, columnist for The Daily Mail, demanded to know, “What have we come to when middle-class girls like this see whoring as a career choice?” Mooney opined, “When it comes to human failings, I always try to be understanding. In fact, readers of my Saturday advice column in the Mail will know that it’s my stock-in-trade. But there are times, I’m afraid, when sympathy fails me and I am left nursing a deep anger which needs putting into words,” she tut-tutted. “Sometimes, even those words fail me. How else to respond to this week’s story of well-educated girls — brought up in decent homes with every privilege — choosing to sell their bodies for a fast buck, not caring how many footballers use them in one week?”

Envisioning Dickensian scenes of street-corner degradation, Mooney claimed that at least those “abject females” selling their bodies to “feed savage drug habits” have an “excuse”. But the Jenny Thompsons of the world, with their “intelligent, well-heeled parents, a stable home, moral guidance, a private education, and all the opportunities that modern life can offer a girl with brains” – what are they thinking?

So, what did turn this middle-class school girl into a £1,200 a night hooker? “If you were being facetious you’d say the answer lies in the question. How many jobs do you know of which pay £1,000 for a few minutes’ light work?” responded Carol Midgley, in The Times. But, of course, the specific why is not what Mooney or Midgley want to know – they want to know where middle class Britain went wrong. Opined Midgely, “Ah, well that’s the thing about money – so unreliable. Some things it just can’t buy. Private schooling couldn’t guarantee Gary Lineker’s son top A level results. And it couldn’t buy Jennifer Thompson class. Class being a pertinent word here.”

But Zoe Williams, writing in The Guardian, claimed that all this talk about Thompson’s A-levels, her mother’s Porsche, and her father’s job as an “oil engineer” is beside the point. “Of course this is a rhetorical question: a private education isn’t meant to teach you specifically how not to be a prostitute. Rather, it is supposed to confer a set of values that would make prostitution an unthinkable proposition,” she observed. “Indeed, a private education is held to be a paradox for any woman sleeping with any footballer, getting paid or not… Furthermore, an education, fee-paying or not, should alone be enough to keep you out of the sex industries, so long as it’s advanced enough.”

Well, she declared, it’s not enough. One in four lap dancers has a degree, according to recent figures. “This is only news because of an assumption that all sex for money – indeed, all objectification – is abuse. You get into it via ignorance and poverty. Nobody would do it without profound problems of self-worth, and a warped relationship with their own sexuality… It’s accepted that there’s no financial context to selling your body, no sliding scale. It is what it is.”

Ultimately, however, selling sex is a bad idea, Williams wrote. “But whether or not a young woman with some good A-levels is selling her body couldn’t be less relevant: we should be pulling this tree up by the roots, not hassling one of the apples.”