Modern manners

In an age of corporate looting, insider trading, commercial gouging and crass commercialism, it is well to ask why we are picking on Didier Drogba for cheating. One tries to emulate one’s betters, and, as Matthew Norman wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, when a co-owner of Birmingham City has done time for pimping and makes his loot as a pornographer, why shouldn’t an overpaid African footballer try bending the rules? Elementary, my dear Roman. After all, if Abramovich can become Britain’s richest man by bending it like Beckham, cheating, diving and using one’s hand to set up a goal should be considered virtues, not vices. Sport follows society, and always has.

Modern Britain, like America, is a brutal, violent place, where middle-class values and elitism stick in the throats of the slobs that lord it over us. Levelling down is the message. Down with Eton and Harrow, down with good manners, down with intelligence and good taste. England’s national pastime, as the Americans would call it, mirrors the state of the culture and society. C’est tout.

And speaking of good taste and good manners, I read about the Queen’s and Lady Pru Penn’s joint 80th birthday party. It took place at Bellamy’s, my friend Gavin Rankin’s restaurant in Mayfair, and a place I use often. Pru Penn I have met a couple of times at my friends Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera’s house, in the Bagel, both of whom were at the bash.

The first time I met her she told me how sad she was that I had been fired from The Spectator without even a word from the editor. This was immediately after my spoof column of goodbye about five years ago. So we became firm friends immediately.