The personal organiser

Tonges have been wagging over the correct job title of Chelsea Clinton's new "personal assistant" at Oxford University, the person she has hired to help organise her schedule as the daughter of a former American president. Judging by the number of parties in London that she and Ian Klause, her Rhodes Scholar boyfriend have been turning up to, it has been suggested that "social secretary" would be a better description.

Only very few VIP grandees in Britain today, such as the media tycoon Lord Black and his wife, or William Farish, the American ambassador to London, continue to employ a bona fide social secretary. The breed has been threatened with extinction thanks to the rise of the more inferior personal assistant, currently the most fashionable ego-enhancement accessory for anybody on the London scene who doesn't work in an office and is either too rich, too lazy or simply too self-important to return their own phone calls, organise their own weekend packing or return their videos.

Those who never have to reply to their own party invitations or queue to buy a tax disc include Jemima Khan, the socialite Taki, Michael Winner, Matthew and Tamara Mellon of Jimmy Choo fame and inevitables such as Claudia Schiffer and Elizabeth Hurley. Even Prince William has recently acquired his own PA - a pretty, young female scion of the Asprey family.

It's no longer just celebrities and wealthy socialites who rely on personal assistants, they have even become de rigueur with the trendy young artist set - Sam Taylor Wood and Damien Hirst have both employed one. Of course, many of these more street-cred celebs-about-town are loath to admit to having a PA, thinking it sounds pretentious and pathetic. "I've been told not to tell anybody that I am their PA," says one well-known artist's assistant. "I'm to say I'm just 'helping out', when, in fact, I work for them full time."

The proliferation of the out-of-office PA is, of course, yet another example of the American hijacking of London's social scene, along with the invasion of £5,000-a-plate charity dinners, daily blow-drys and baby showers.

But this new breed of PA doesn't quite have the edge on social secretaries who are able to put off undesirable callers with their terrifying upper-class accents, know where the fish knife sits, are free to advise on how to address the daughter of an earl and on first-name terms with Mitch and Kevin, the day and night managers at The Ivy.

Social rank is all with a social secretary and it is often they who teach their employers the finer points of social etiquette. A female friend on Tatler's Most Invited List who advertised last year for a social secretary in the Spectator received a dozen replies, including an application from a former royal secretary.

The woman who got the job - "My very own Mary Poppins" - was hired on account of the covering letter she faxed in the middle of the night. "Since you live in W1, I imagine you do not have your fax machine in the bedroom," wrote the applicant in elegant handwriting.

This attitude can be unusually important: it is not unknown for social secretaries - whose desks are often a sea of silver-embossed stationery goods from Smythson and piled with more leather-bound diaries than even Edwina Currie would know what to do with - to actually write the household's thank-you letters.

But the best thing about both a social secretary and her modern equivalent is that, if you don't have a proper job, employing someone to organise your next hairdressing appointment can make you feel very, very busy indeed.