Marco Pierre White, David Beckham and even my own offspring help to raise awareness of a growing scourge, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

LAST MONDAY I had a delightful lunch with the turkey ambassador. He didn’t appear to know anything much about Ankara or care whether Turkey joined the European Union, but seemed more interested in what people eat for Christmas.

It was the chef, Marco Pierre White, who had just been given the title by Bernard Matthews, the biggest British turkey producer, and was therefore flying the flag of the battery bird.

After lunch and back in the office, I started reading something about women on boards and saw that Sir Win Bischoff, chairman of Lloyds bank, has a new title too: he is women-on-boards ambassador.

Two swallows don’t make a summer but when I got home, I found that during the day I had become the parent of an ambassador: one of my children had been asked to be an ambassador for her school society.

And finally, just as I was going to bed, I heard on the radio much talk of the England ambassador – who turned out to be David Beckham.

The world, it seems, has become over-run with ambassadors.

Indeed, if WikiLeaks had seized all the e-mails of everyone with this title the volume of traffic would not merely have caused the site to crash, but would have brought the entire internet down.

A proper ambassador, as revealed by the leaked cables, turns out to be something rather special.

Hardworking, clever, and with an ability to say things that we had long suspected – Canadians have an inferiority complex, for instance – in a writing style that is clear and sometimes sharply funny.

I’m not saying that White, Beckham, Bischoff and my child aren’t special. Each of them is getting behind a cause either because they believe in it, for money, or because they’ve been told to do so.

For these reasons, they possibly have a small claim on the title.

The same can’t be said for most of the others who use it. Last week, I was sent an e-mail by Heidrick and Struggles saying that the headhunter is urging all chief executives in 2011 to “step into the role of ambassador” for no particular reason at all.

To use the title you don’t need a cause, you just need a proper noun to put in front of it.

As I battled home on my bike in the snow I thought that at least weather was beyond employing ambassadors.

I was wrong.

The Met Office has employed a Weather Ambassador for some time.

Later, as I was thinking of turning in, I googled “sleep ambassador” and the number one item was Nancy H Rothstein, whose mission is “to assist you and your organisation on the road to sleep wellness”.

Is that what used to be called sleeping well, I wonder?

The second item thrown up by Google proved even more alarming. To be an ambassador, it is no longer even necessary to be a human being. The Tower Sleep Ambassador is a mattress, and quite a measly one at that. It’s just 2ft 6in wide and costs a rather unambassadorial £129.

You might have thought that at least social networks would be free of ambassadors. On the contrary: the apparent democracy of social networks has created a great hunger for the grandiose title. Coca-Cola has employed three “Happiness Ambassadors” to travel the world this year to take pictures and post them on Twitter.

Even more alarming is Charmin toilet paper, which recently paid five people $10,000 to be “bathroom ambassadors” and stand by mobile loos in Times Square tweeting about whether customers were managing to “enjoy the go”. The quality needed for this job was not a life’s career in the diplomatic service but “a real interest in going to the bathroom”.

I have just e-mailed the only real ambassador in my address book to ask if he minded all this ambassador creep. He said no – if people wanted to use his title that was fine by him.

However, that might just be because the temperature is -20 where he is and one of his main tasks is staying alive, which may make him less picky about words than I am.

In researching this topic I have found that the only people who don’t have ambassadors are ambassadors themselves.

As becoming a nouveau ambassador requires no training or qualifications and one can appoint oneself to the role without asking anyone else, I henceforth am taking on the title of Ambassador Ambassador.

The cause I’m in favour of is to keep the term for bona fide ambassadors. You can only use the title if you are a diplomat who writes a decent cable and, like the man immortalised in the Ferrero Rocher telly ads, serves only the finest chocolate at parties.– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)