I live with a supermodel -- excessively fussy about diet and grooming. Sadly this gorgeous creature has four legs not two, and is a boy not a girl. He is a Pekingese dog and, five years ago, he was a birthday present from my wife. (She, too, of course, is a supermodel. ) My Pekingese is extremely special. Every British Pekingese is currently extremely special. In figures published recently, the Kennel Club lists only 567 pekes in the country, with only seven accredited peke breeders. This works out at around one peke per 100,000 of population. This challenges the principle of a little going a long way. For God's sake, this challenges the principle of the parable of loaves and fishes.

How did this happen? And what are we doing about it?

If the Pekingese were a bird, bearded weirdos in dodgy footwear would be launching a nationwide rescue campaign backed by Defra. The peke would become a car sticker, one tail-wag away from being tax deductible (there's a thought). Instead, no one has noticed. And no one much cares.

Pekes, like supermodels, conjure up a definite image. A peke is the bouffant armwarmer into which Dame Barbara Cartland morphed shortly before her departure to the great kennels in the sky. He is forever Tricky Woo, that fat, white, cake-eating canine who, in the 1970s, stole the show in All Creatures Great and Small. A peke is something risible and Mills & Boon-ish, glimpsed in soft focus in old-fashioned society portraits: spoilt, useless, purely decorative.

I don't know about you, but I've just convinced myself anew. Sounds fantastic. What other antidote to austerity Britain can be snapped up for a few hundred quid and give 15 years of pleasure, lasting precisely long enough to accompany you from bust to boom and back again? Beats any saving plan yet devised -- and it comes with its own sound effects, a deep, throaty snoring, like Alf Garnett asleep under a knotted hankie on the beach at Broadstairs.

Canine fashion is an unfathomable business. The Kennel Club points out that declining peke figures are balanced by rising numbers of shih tzus and lhasa apsos, a slight I consider on a par with a breeder offering a part-exchange: your old Norfolk terrier for a new Yorkie. Who are the people making shih tzus and lhasa apsos so popular? Can they compare with the rollcall of Britain's past peke owners: Queen Victoria, Rumer Godden, Beatrix Potter?

Such a galaxy, clearly, is not enough. Is it then a question of effort? Pekingese were once the exclusive playmates of Chinese emperors, waited on by their own staff of eunuchs and housed in their own gilded palace. They are imperious, largely untrainable little dogs, who seldom do anything except what they want (they are therefore, as I have found, excellent practice for new parents). Their intractable natures make demands on owners. Then there's the grooming. And of course they don't really do anything (snipe shooting, anyone? ). I'm forced to the conclusion that, as a society, we have lost patience with anything that ticks the twin boxes of decorative and demanding. And that is surely dangerous.

Operating on this principle, the British would never have governed princely India.

French kings would have spurned those splendid mistresses who fanned the flames of a luxury goods trade that continues to this day. Coutts would have pulled the plug on the Queen Mother's overdraft. And the Angel of the North would never have cast its bulky shadow over unlovely Gateshead.

There are economic, social and cultural implications in turning our backs on those aspects of our national life which do little but demand much in return for a glorious façade.

No matter that the Pekingese has lost the majority vote: the minority voice is democracy's triumph, mass rule invariably a precursor to loss of freedoms. Survival of the fittest may be the guiding principle of Mother Nature, but it is the opposite approach to that adopted by the Nanny State.

During the sacking of Peking in 1860, it was an Englishman who made away with five small, flat-faced dogs whose owner had committed suicide and whose house was disappearing under the torch. French soldiers in the nearby camp looted porcelain and jade.

But Captain Hart Dunne rescued the terrified dogs and nursed them through the long voyage back to Blighty. He presented one to Queen Victoria, who, without apparent irony, christened the dog Looty.

How heart-warmingly British -- to save the underdog, then treat it as a friendly joke.