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Better always late than selectively late

Better always to be late than selectively so

Harry Mount

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

A defence of the neglected virtue of punctuality

The Queen has always realised the essential effect of bad timekeeping — that although you, the latecomer, don’t mind being late, someone else (in this case, the royal staff) does mind. So whenever her mother dawdled in unnecessary conversation, the then 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth took to stabbing her in the Achilles tendon with her umbrella to hurry her along. It’s said, too, that the Queen gets just as infuriated with Prince Charles for being slow in winding up conversations and ending up late as a result.

Prince Charles is not the only one. Attitudes to punctuality in Britain have changed deeply over the last generation. To still think of the British as punctual, you have to either be old or not have lived in this country for a long time. Or both. That’s why a British headmaster who stayed on in Pakistan after Partition in 1947 is this week misguidedly looking for a British replacement to take over at his public school in Chitral, northern Pakistan. ‘I should prefer if the candidates were British or people who share the values of duty and honesty,’ says the optimistic headmaster, G.D. Langlands, who has just turned 90, ‘and punctuality — which some Pakistanis are not so good at.’

The change in our standards of punctuality since Mr Langlands left Britain is connected to the boom market in self-importance. It is also due to the explosion in popularity of the latecomer’s closest friend, the one he never misses an appointment with — his mobile phone. Before the mobile, even the most amoral latecomer felt a batsqueak of guilt at not being able to get his flimsy excuse to the old friend waiting by the Tube station gate. Now he can assuage that guilt — and turn up even later — by sending regular updates about his lateness in a series of mini-confessions sent by text — the ultimate confrontation-avoider.

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