POSH doctor Brooke Magnanti has outed herself as the prostitute Belle de Jour, whose mildly pornographic scribblings have kept many an excited person entertained of an evening, especially when they were screened on TV starring Billie Piper.

Dr Magnanti – nowadays she researches the impact on babies of their mother’s exposure to toxic chemicals – says her sex work was “so much more enjoyable than working on a computer”.

Worthies and commenta-tors have huffed and puffed about the impression this creates but really, what else can she say?

How else could she have possibly justified sleeping with men for money to get her through college?

She may be a doctor now but Brooke Magnanti is surely a businesswoman at heart. Right from the off, when she started her anony-mous blog, she probably guessed that a litany of complaints about pervy losers was not going to get the kind of box office that saucy tales of sex for money would engender.

No one pays top dollar to read how ghastly prostitution is. That’s why, nearly two decades after it was made, the Pretty Woman movie is still so popular. And why Dr Belle’s crisply-written prose earns her so much crust.

Her employers valiantly say her past is “not relevant” to what she’s doing now. Not to her scientific work maybe, but whatever people say to her face, however “supportive” they are, agreeing that she has “moved on”, behind her back it’ll be a different picture. Her female colleagues will gossip about her when she’s not around. Her male colleagues will secretly see her as a bit of goer and somewhere along the line, I suspect it will probably all blow up.

Prostitutes should not be looked down on because they do a difficult job, but sadly, they are. And unlike Dr Belle, the vast majority of them go into it because they truly feel they have no other choice.

The fact that 70 per cent of UK prostitutes have been in care at any one point tells you how very unusual Dr Belle is, with her good education, middle-class upbringing and her choices. And that’s why so many people criticise her, because she had real choices and chose to do what she did.

I’ve known and interviewed a few prostitutes in my time and my admiration is all theirs because they are providing a service that the majority of society doesn’t even want to think about.

The wise working girls tell it like it is, without trying to make out there are no emotional drawbacks and to a woman, they’ll tell you they’d rather be doing something else. Dr Belle is an exception precisely because her experiences are so very Blytonesque; with clients that don’t beat her, rape her and steal all her money, who don’t insult her to her face and who generally aren’t drunk, smelly and ignorant.

Brooke Magnanti may vehemently have no regrets but somehow I feel the lady protests too much. I also get the feeling that while she may have been a happy hooker, being a happy ex-hooker will prove much, much more elusive.