Sugar daddies have no place in student life

It’s GCSE year in Woods Towers, and just when my 15-year-old butterfly should be at home, crushing herself on the wheel of Michael Gove’s punishing new curriculum, we’re traipsing round sixth-form colleges.

Still, it’s a splendid opportunity to chit-chat about learning pathways, universities and whether she’d like to fund her studies by taking up with a lecherous boulevardier.

“You mean a sugar daddy?” she asks. “Well, as I see it, it solves two problems that are becoming really major issues in modern society – spiralling student debt and chronic loneliness among old people.”

She is winding me up. I hope she is winding me up. But she wants to study sociology, so she might not be winding me up. She might actually believe it.

The subject arose because a huge billboard appeared outside Queens’ College Cambridge advertising a website richmeetsbeautiful.co.uk

Its strapline reads: “All Students! Romance, passion, fun and in-study loan? Date a Sugar Daddy or Sugar Mama.”

Five of these billboards will be touring 12 university towns in a bid to drum up interest in the site. Terrifying. But having logged on – partly in the interests of research, partly because I imagine sugar daddies all look like Young Mr Grace from Are You Being Served? – I was reassured.

None of this vague air of exploitation; this is upfront transactionalism. Plus, it’s entirely American. If our daughters and sons are to be exploited, let them be exploited in pounds sterling!

Sugar babies are expected to tick a box corresponding to their living costs: negotiable, low, moderate, substantial and high. High is more than £7,500 a month, which is pretty hard to spend in Cambridge, even though there is a Debenhams.

And as for sugar daddies, I think they have been cut and pasted very badly. A fat bloke from Buckhurst Hill in a hoodie posing with a plastic pirate claims to be worth £100million.

I’m not sure how I resisted, but somehow I did. I think the next generation will, too.