Without further ado, Lost in Showbiz is coming out as Team Tulisa, and anyone who declines to join me is cordially invited to do one to the showbiz outlets where the singer is routinely described as a "chav" or a "council estate Barbie".

In case you had been preoccupied by other matters, let me recap by saying that the erstwhile X Factor judge was the victim of a Sun on Sunday sting last weekend, and is accused of obliging the undercover reporter's requests for a contact who would sell him some cocaine. The news forces an urgent shakeup of the odds for the prize of Greatest Newspaper Investigation Ever, which now stand as: Tulisa Can Get You A Number For Someone Who'll GetYou Some Coke 1/9, Watergate 3/1, and Thalidomide 11/1. It's 16/1 bar those.

The police have since responded by arresting Tulisa and raiding her house mobhanded. And I think I speak for all of us with a passionate interest in justice when I say how encouraging it is to see them still lavishing so much manpower on following up News International stories about comparatively minuscule offences, when approximately 37 seconds of time was spent considering those bin bags of evidence of far more serious wrongdoing against the firm's own journalists.

Tulisa is now on bail, her epithet formally altered to "cocaine quiz star", which has left the Sun casting around for further ways to stick the boot in. "TULISA BLOWS IT ONCE AGAIN" was the crowing headline yesterday, which sweetly appeared to celebrate the fact that she has been left with a massive legal bill after abandoning a battle for damages against the ratbag ex-boyfriend who leaked a sex tape of her on to the internet last year. Hurrah for him! Or something.

As for the World! Exclusive! Shock! of Tulisa having a number for someone who could get them drugs, it seems almost too obvious to marvel at the sheltered lives tabloid journalists lead. These existences see them shocked into a fit of the vapours by the old "celebrity takes drugs" story, which felt knackered in 1998 and is currently kept alive only by hacks with no imagination, a parodic number of whom are currently on police bail themselves.

In fact, Lost in Showbiz should make clear that they didn't even goad Tulisa into taking any drugs – she is only accused of helping the reporter get some as opposed to indulging herself, which must mark her out as something of a rarity in entertainment circles, and very possibly in 24-year-old circles up and down the land. Indeed, for the sake of their nerves, I do hope none of these crack investigative reporters ever venture into a lively urban pub on a Saturday night, or indeed into the sort of bucolic watering hole in which Prince Harry was once exposed as buying his party treats of a weekend. The shock of the warp and weft of young British life might finish them off.

Prince Harry, of course, did not have his career ruined, while Tulisa is said to be in bits and declaring her life to be over. You can understand her fatalism: after all, the tale does feel rather like the culmination of the same inescapable narrative that informs almost every story about Tulisa that ever appears. Can you put your finger on what it is about this successful 24-year-old that is so wholly offensive to so many scribes? Let's take a wander through some of the headlines and see if they yield an inkling.

"Tulisa really is a chav in a tracksuit as she goes to Tesco for late-night shopping," observes the Daily Mail on one occasion. "You look like council estate Barbie," runs another Daily Mail offering, adding that "Tulisa shows uncanny resemblance to Little Britain chav Vicky Pollard". Then we've "X Factor judge Tulisa Contastavlos shows off her 'chav' fashion style" in the Sun, and "Tulisa reveals chavvy tattoo in skimpy bikini" in the Mirror. (Lost in Showbiz does admire this ability to keep writing as though their readers were the snootily rarefied mix of Jackie Bouvier and Karl Lagerfeld, when instinct suggests they are far more relaxed about these etiquette crimes than appears to be assumed.)

Anyway back to the paper trail: "Queen of the chavs: six months ago she was the glam face of Saturday night TV. But look at Tulisa now!" (Mail). "Chav Tulisa puts on ladylike front … sort of" (Sun). There are a whole raft of stories in which Tulisa is apparently "warned by X Factor bosses: change your chavvy style'. "She looked too chavvy and cheap on the first day of auditions," a source tells the Sun. "They want her to have a designer look with chic class – more Posh Spice than Vicky Pollard in Little Britain, which is how she has looked more than a few times."

Next up is her unbearably déclassé habit of smoking in her X Factor dressing room, apparently, with a source moaning to the Sun that Tulisa's "chavvy pals" were drinking from the minibar. How intriguing the X Factor minibar access privileges do sound. Perhaps Cowell's henchmen run them on the old NRS social grades, allowing only C1s and above to partake of the contents.

The headlines go on, of course, and there isn't the space to even start on their innumerable blog equivalents, which manage the feat of being even more artless. "Tulisa lives up to Louis Walsh's 'chav in a tracksuit' comments," opines the Huffington Post, which unwisely essays archness with the observation: "Someone's had their JD Sports discount card come through, haven't they?"

What that headline does do, of course, is remind us that it was Tulisa's own X Factor judging colleague Louis Walsh who first branded her a "chav in a tracksuit". Dear Louis – always so pitiably aware of his need to create inter-judge "conflict", lest Simon Cowell chuck him on the scrapheap like he did once before. This week, his baton was taken up by returning judge Sharon Osbourne – a woman who has monetised the drug-addled eccentricities of her husband beyond even her own wildest dreams, yet apparently declared pointedly of Tulisa's arrest: "I loved it."

I see Sharon's spokesperson has since hastily claimed that Sharon was in fact responding to a different question when she uttered these words; the film of the encounter can be viewed here, so do be the judge.

Of course, Sharon isn't the only star who has appeared weirdly keen to define themselves against Tulisa. Think of Kelly Brook joshing about watching Tulisa's sex tape "several times" as research for some film role. Or indeed of sisterly Amanda Holden, who apparently saw no inconsistency in disliking her private phone messages being hacked, and going on a chatshow to snigger that she'd watched the tape (apparently Amanda's fellow Britain's Got Talent judge Alesha Dixon mailed the link), and that it was definitely Tulisa.

Ah well. Thank heavens so many man hours have been dedicated to the absolutely essential public-service task of putting a jumped-up little thing like Tulisa back in her place. The natural order of things has been restored, and we may expect the first "back where she belongs" headlines by midsummer.