In the past I would have been interested in crafting plausible excuses for unforgivable social behaviour such as failing to turn up to events to which you had RSVP’d, missing a netjet or having said something genuinely appalling. One example: circa 1999, the late Rt Hon Alan Clark MP wrote to Dear Mary. He asked how, without losing face, he could apologise to someone he hugely admired, but to whom he had found himself being inexplicably rude at a party.
For minor social crimes white lies are acceptable, if by being truthful you will rob another person of their self-confidence
We all knew that Alan Clark was temperamental but his target had been Boris so he obviously couldn’t have meant the insults. I suggested Clark might laugh off the incident by attributing the incident to his ingestion of a certain sleeping pill, which had famously just been withdrawn from the market following findings that it could trigger uncharacteristic outbursts.
It was fun at the time. But it’s a different matter today now that we are surrounded on all sides by fakery, fraudulence and, to paraphrase the Times’s James Marriott, ambient Ripleyism. You might quite plausibly say ‘I just couldn’t find the car keys/we had a gas leak and had to wait for them to come and turn it off/I would love to tell you what happened to explain my unforgivable behaviour but I’m afraid I had to sign an NDA.’
But in 2024 such excuses veer dangerously near to proper confidence trickster territory and joining in with the battle against truth. For major social crimes you will just have to admit you are hopeless, perhaps exaggerating your personal inadequacies without elaborating on them, and insist on taking your offendees to the Wolseley by way of helping them to forgive you.
But for minor social crimes white lies are acceptable, if by being truthful you will rob another person of their self-confidence. One of these is when you fail to recognise another perhaps they have aged so much or become so fat or thin, especially now with Ozempic. You can’t just say ‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea who you are’. It’s important that they don’t feel that they seemed so unmemorable to you that you never really registered them in the first place.
Quickly say, ‘let me update my contacts before we go any further,’ bring out your phone and ask them to put their name in. Always head straight for the seating plan at a party. That will jog your memory and ideally photograph it for later study.
I am very keen on name badges for all at all social parties but others object that it gives too corporate an atmosphere They would’ve been brilliant at a funeral wake I once attended for Jeremy Sandford, someone I had not seen for years. As the party thinned out I noticed a condolence book which had been signed by all leaving attendees and suddenly I could put names to faces but it was too late.
When you have to sack someone, one kind way to do it is to say that their presence in your office is making you uncomfortable – pause – as they are clearly far too talented for the position they are in. And for failure to show up to a casual and informal local event how about ‘I couldn’t risk coming because my husband has some explosive gossip and I knew he would be unable to resist telling everyone at the party.’
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