I like Jack Davenport as an actor, I really do.

I’ve been glued to the first couple of episodes of Breathless, the stylish medical drama following the lives and loves of the staff of a London hospital in the 1960s.

But I’ve gone right off him as a person after reading an interview he gave to the My Family Values section of the Guardian newspaper in the publicity run-up to the launch of the series.

The son of actors Nigel Davenport and Maria Aitken, he’s a posh boy, the grandson of a baron and related to Lord Beaverbrook. As a child, he enjoyed a top-class education as a boarder at the independent Dragon School in Oxford.

In the interview, he explained that he’d send his three-year-old son Harry to his old school but not as a boarder, partly because it’s so expensive. But it was his second reason that revealed the man I don’t like: “You don’t want your kid hanging out with a load of rich kids.”

Oh. In one throwaway line, he has expressed utter contempt for an entire group of children who, through no fault of their own, happen to have parents who are rich – yes, just like his own wealthy relatives, including his parents, who had enough dosh to pay for him to board at the school. Logic takes you to the conclusion that, bizarrely, he is contemptuous both of himself and his own parents.

But just imagine the outcry if he’d said the opposite: “You don’t want your kid hanging out with a load of poor kids”. Elitist snob, outraged Guardian readers would have shrieked.

But no one seems to have raised so much as an eyebrow at his assumption that rich kids are not good enough to associate with his son, even though a couple of paragraphs later he was happily boasting about how his maternal grandmother, Penelope, was a “posh old lady... a debutante who hobnobbed with royals”.

He is a snob, the opposite type to those who believe they are superior to people who are poorer or less well educated than them, but it is still rooted in the belief that that you are better than someone else. It’s the same as calling someone trash or worthless, because you are giving yourself the right to judge a person’s worth.

Isn’t it odd how although it has long been unspeakable to be condescending to people you consider to be your social inferiors, it has become acceptable to be just as contemptuous of people with more money than you? But it’s still snobbery and it’s still unpleasant.