Life under Labour has been sweet for Sloanes

Armed with a copy, we will be able, effortlessly, to distinguish between the ridiculous "Chav Sloanes", like Lady Victoria Hervey, and the equally absurd crystal-dangling "Bongo Sloanes" like Madonna.

Some may say that by updating his 1982 classic, York is only dressing up mutton in Ugg boots (a favoured Sloane-nouveau accessory), but I say York has never made any secret of where his heart lies. I once asked him: "Peter, if you had a time machine, which era would you visit?" The venerable style guru thought for a while before answering unequivocally: "Oh, the 1980s, darling. I was absolutely huge, then." It's a measure of York's acuity that he understands the intrinsic relation between class, London location and the British upper classes and the parvenus who ape their mores in order to gain acceptance. The period between 1982 and 2007 may have seen enormous social changes elsewhere in the country one thinks, immediately, of the wholesale loss of primary and manufacturing industry, the enormous increase in immigration but you'd be hard put to see this just by trolling down the King's Road.

Margaret Thatcher may have called for a return to "Victorian values", but her economic reforms were widely credited with opening the Pandora's box of social revolution, and radically transforming the British class system.

With the benefit of Peter York's time machine we can see that this was far from true. The Big Bang opened the City up to wide boys from the East End, while the breaking of union power and the sale of council houses created a new dispensation, in which the vast majority of Britons viewed themselves as "middle class".

Yet when the Tories left office in 1997, the distinguishing marks of the west London upper-middle classes remained exactly the same. And have continued to be so. Under Blair, the Sloanes have become another service sector, just like the rest of the British economy; their only distinction being that they offer party planning, house searching and fashion accessorising to the superrich.

The title of York's revamped Guide says it all: Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: The Return of the Sloane Ranger. Turbo Sloanes, Party Sloanes, Euro Sloanes, Eco Sloanes they've all crawled back. Blair came to power pledged to a programme of radical change and modernising, but he has left it with little to show for his decade in office but a fourfold increase in Sloanes.