Appearance: Grinning advertisement for a particularly effective brand of toothpaste.
Status: Well-connected socialite and author.
Well-connected? Mum and dad are loaded landowners; little sister is reformed It-girl Tara Palmer-Tomkinson; her husband is the esteemed man of letters Simon Sebag-Montefiore.
Isn't there anyone in her immediate circle with fewer than two barrels to their surname? Not unless you count Charles Windsor, her godfather, who snubbed Jiang Zemin to dine with the Sebag-etceteras last week. Or William Windsor, with whom her sister would like to stress she has definitely never slept. Oh, and Miss X.
Miss X? That's the cunning pseudonym Santa used so agents would read it on its merits. It's innocuous, you see - after all, there are thousands of people with the surname X, aren't there?
And did the ingenious scheme work? It landed Santa a book deal rumoured to be worth £100,000 after a furious bidding war between publishers last Thursday.
With a nom de plume like that, it sounds like it ought to be the steamy paperback memoirs of a 19th-century Parisian prostitute. Actually, it's a "tragic, epic love story" called Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree. It's set in Argentina, where Santa spent a year in 1989.
Another tedious gap year novel, you mean. Santa says the novel, to be published in 18 months, is an allegory of her love for the country.
Is the publishing world excited by her debut? You bet. An executive at Hodder and Stoughton said: "She is a wonderful new writer of talent and promise, and her book is an enthralling, epic romance."
And who won the bidding war? Erm, Hodder and Stoughton.
Don't say: "What on earth is an ombu tree anyway?"
Not to be confused with: Jacques Santer, Father Christmas.
