Move the Zanussi? We don’t all live at Downton, Kirstie

QUESTION of the week, class! Why did Queen of Craft and telly presenter Kirstie Allsopp have to quit Twitter after pronouncing it was ‘ disgusting’ to have your washing machine in the kitchen?

Mine’s in the kitchen. It’s the only place with a concrete floor and water pipes and space available. Very handy. I can take the wet, wrinkly clothes out and drape them straight over the Aga. I even hang the family’s smalls from a special round plastic rack fitted with clothes pegs so that they dangle over the steaming saucepans, to the horror of any guests who hover to chat and ‘help’.

Thinking of my own possibly unsanitary domestic arrangements, I at first assumed the row was all about germs.

After all, washing- machine-in-kitchen- gate started with an American journalist tweeting: ‘Americans in our office are always confused by the British habit of putting washing machines in kitchens and view this as disgusting.’

Americans are famous germophobes: the current President won’t touch the ground-floor elevator button on the principle that it is the most frequently pressed.

After the journalist’s tweet, Kirstie jumped in: ‘It is disgusting, my life’s work is in part dedi- cated to getting washing machines out of the kitchen.’

As the brouhaha erupted, she protested that she’d been banging on about this for 18 years, adding that she’d only advised moving the washing machine out of the kitchen ‘if possible’.

Americans ( and Australians, apparently) may be revolted by our peculiar habit but it is possible for them: they have huge basements for their massive ‘ toploader’ machines, whereas here we have the smallest houses in Europe. Indeed, our average three-bedder measures just 88 square metres – five square metres smaller than the regulatory minimum.

Kirstie therefore stood accused of an airy assumption that we have anywhere else to put the damn things, when we don’t.

Bathrooms are mostly too small and, anyway, building regs dictate you can’t have an electrical socket within three metres of a bath or shower. Three metres? Where does Ms Allsopp think we all live? Downton Abbey? So Twitter went into one of its outraged spasms and gave poor Miss Allsopp, the daughter of a baron, a kicking for being a snooty Lady Muck.

Now the Hon Kirstie generally likes a scrap but decided the heat in the kitchen this time was too much. She changed her Twitter bio to ‘Working Mum and Stepmum who’s… no longer on Twitter’.

She had touched a national nerve again. Given a choice, no one would have a noisy, ugly machine in their kitchen.

The kitchen is now the hub of the home, and having an ‘ eat- i n kitchen’ is both an aspiration and a reflection of a cosier, more intimate way of living.

The Duchess of Cambridge put a ‘private family kitchen’ in the state apartment in Kensington Palace in 2014. Hello! magazine always photographs celebrities who are soon to divorce in gleaming show kitchens.

Now, as brilliant, charming and toothsome property expert Kirstie herself knows, it’s women who buy houses and kitchens that sell them. So what went wrong last week is that the women of Britain got chippy with Kirstie for setting the nation a How Posh Is Your Kitchen test, and failing most of us in one light-hearted but lethal tweet.

This wasn’t about hygiene, or even the location, location, location of the washing machine, really. It was, as ever, about class, class.