Poor little rich girls …

PARIS HILTON has reportedly made more than $1bn from the global merchandising sales of products ranging from scent and shoes to clothing and handbags in recent years, and is expanding by the day.

She has tried to reinvent herself. As she puts it: “I’m an author, a recording artist, an actress …” and now, it seems, a tycoon.

However, I suppose at least she’s achieving something.

Which is more than can be said for Tamara and Petra Ecclestone who give the impression that being a vapid, spoilt clothes-horse is a career.

The only career they’ve ever had is that of being celebrities; not celebrated for anything other than being celebrated.

Let’s face it. They’re famous because they’re rich. That’s it really. (Their father, Bernie, is reportedly worth $4 billion.)

Paris, too, is a mega-rich heiress. An autobiography (‘Be My Guest’), by her great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton, describes how he built up his hotel empire from nothing.

In Texas, he stopped at a small, run-down hotel overflowing due to the oil boom.

He didn’t get a room, but within days bought this “cross between a flophouse and a gold mine.”

The rest as they say, is history. Paris, likewise, seems equally keen to make her own fortune.

But at least she’s given us some entertainment over the years with her sex tape, incarcerations, born-again Christianity and hilarious declarations to become a ‘missionary’ to Rwandan orphans. Paris, Tamara, Petra and all the other poor little rich girls.

They all have the money and opportunity to do something worthwhile with their lives but none of the intelligence or intent.

Unlike Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, with his multimillion dollar-funded Gates Foundation tasked with finding cures for endemic diseases in Africa like malaria.

A most curious age in which we now live, wherein someone is fêted as a celebrity simply for being well-known. But not for brains, talent, discoveries or humanity – this ‘nothingness’ merely serving to emphasise how our society isn’t the meritocracy it claims to be.

In years to come, students wishing to dissect and analyse our ‘celeb’ times will write theses about the phenomena of Paris, Tamara, Petra and the like.

But maybe their singular contribution is to cause us all to reflect upon, and change, what society truly values.

Nora Johnson’s novels, Soul Stealer & The De Clerambault Code (www.nora-johnson.com) now available at Amazon.es in paperback and eBook (€0.89; Amazon UK: £0.77). Profits to Cudeca