Dear me, people seem to have got their knickers in a right twist over Gordon Brown’s plan to make the school curriculum, like, more cool and contemporary.

So he wants teachers to drop Winston Churchill and teach maths via the concept of DIY home improvements? They call that dumbing down? If Gordon is serious about modernising lessons then he should make Katie Price’s new novel a set text. You may be more familiar with the author as “the 34FF glamour girl Jordan”. Whatever. I’m sure we all concur that her latest work is a fascinating 21st-century document of British culture, social aspiration and the perils of sleeping with your mate’s boyfriend.

What — you haven’t read it? Tsk, you really aren’t keeping up with popular tastes are you? Crystal stormed straight to the top of the hardback bestseller list, elbowing aside the likes of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain. And why not? Has there ever been a finer sentence in the English language than “the shorts were so far up her bum cheeks it must have felt like she was flossing her a******e every time she sat down”?

For any sex-education teachers reading, be assured that there are also safe-sex messages in the book. “They fell on to one of the huge white sofas in a tangle of limbs. Crystal didn’t care that he might think she was easy or a slag; she just wanted him and it felt so right . . . Then she was slipping down his black Calvins. . . then he was stopping her, reaching for a condom.”

Ditto the obesity crisis. “Belle turned on Crystal: ‘F*** off, I’m a size 6.’ Crystal sighed. She couldn’t be bothered arguing with Belle, who was definitely a size 8.”

You get the idea. We’re talking girl bands, The X-Factor, sex, breast size, designer clothes – the preoccupations of modern youth. It only struck me just how much She of the Helium Balloon Breasts is dominating British mores when I popped into W H Smith and saw Crystal displayed next to Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years. It was flying off the shelves – Jordan’s more than Alastair’s. Naturally, I joined the queue. Well, they’d knocked £2 off and who could resist a “glittering and sexy story of passion and betrayal and one woman’s search for true love” for £7.99? It is, I can confirm, thrillingly awful.

So why am I writing about it? Well, if you want to talk about in-vogue, contemporary literature I’m afraid this is a big part of the story. Celebrity fiction is booming. Naomi Campbell, Pamela Anderson, Ivana Trump, Nicole Richie – they can all add “novelist” to their CVs now. Their books may be fist-chewingly bad but usually they outsell those on the Booker shortlist several times over. And the customers are the very people who gorge on celebrity magazines and usually couldn’t be persuaded to open a novel if you threatened to clout them over the head with it.

So perhaps we owe Jordan and co a debt of gratitude? A survey by social scientists at Manchester University earlier this month showed that, contrary to popular belief, British people – especially women – are spending more time reading books than they did 30 years ago. The average time women spent reading a book jumped from two minutes a day in 1975 to eight minutes in 2000. Men’s reading time rose from three to five minutes a day. Celebrities have done a fair bit to fuel this trend. The first volume of Price’s autobiography, Being Jordan, sold more than a million copies and became the fourth bestselling autobiography so far (Sharon Osbourne’s autobiography, Extreme, sold even more). Price’s debut novel, Angel, was a bestseller.

True, the word “author” is possibly stretching things since she didn’t exactly sit crouched over a laptop into the small hours, Roget’s Thesaurus in hand. Her ghost-writer, Rebecca Farnworth, penned the books yet her name appears in teeny tiny print on the copyright page. Still, does it really matter these days? Pushy parents increasingly do their children’s coursework for them anyway so they’re hardly in a position to get sniffy.

Shocking as it might sound, I wonder whether Katie Price is such a bad role model for today’s youth? Parents were warned last week that they are raising a generation of spoilt brats who resent working because they are never made to do chores at home, are ferried everywhere like royalty and haven’t a clue how to manage finances. The Association of Graduate Recruiters says that employers find many school-leavers unwilling to perform menial tasks that they consider beneath them.

You could accuse Jordan of many things but failing to graft isn’t one of them. You might not approve of her early foray into showbiz – parading her Spacehopperish breast implants – but she is a self-made multimillionaire because she rolled up her sleeves (and other items of clothing) with an absolute determination to succeed. Unlike so many reality TV contestants these days who expect a free ride to fame and fortune, she exemplifies someone who got there via a ruthless business sense and working seven-day weeks.

There is another book in the bestseller lists at the moment, one that has dominated the American charts for weeks and is selling 150,000 copies a week. The Secret is a drivelly self-help manual that takes 195 pages to make one point – you can be or do anything so long as you think positively and believe that you deserve success. Katie Price conveys that message far more succinctly than The Secret. I’m not exactly sure what her secret is but between you and me I wouldn’t say no to a pint of what she’s drinking.

With a little help from his friends

The Manchester “music legend” Anthony Wilson, who managed bands such as New Order and the Happy Mondays, founded the Hacienda nightclub and inspired the film 24 Hour Party People, has kidney cancer. Chemotherapy failed to cure him so doctors recommended Sutent, a drug that has doubled the life expectancy of some patients. But the Manchester NHS Primary Care Trust refuses to fund the drug, which costs £3,500 a month. Wilson says that if he lived nearby in Cheshire the authorities there would have paid for it. Obviously health trusts can’t make exceptions for individuals, but it seems desperately sad that a man who brought so much wealth and kudos to a city should be turned away at payback time. “I used to say some people make money and some make history,” he says. “Which is very funny until you find you can’t afford to keep yourself alive.” But now he is receiving the drug after members of the Happy Mondays and other acts he mentored heard of his plight and stepped in to finance a fund. Wilson may feel let down by the system but he should take comfort that in the cutthroat music industry such a gesture shows how valued he is.

Discerning moths

An infestation of moths is laying siege to the finer wardrobes of London. Alex Foxton, a designer at Louis Vuitton, and Alexandra Shulman, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, are among the hundreds of Londoners whose clothes have been nibbled at as Rentokil reports a 25 per cent increase in call-outs. The moths are fussy eaters, enjoying only exotic fabrics such as cashmere and turn their antennae up at synthetic fibres. You know what this means, don’t you? That possibly for the first time in our lives those of us with wardrobes full of Gap, H&M and cheapo high street polyblend jumpers can look over our shoulders and feel utterly smug.

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