ANOTHER VOICE
What sort of world order will follow the collapse of manners?
AUBERON WAUGH
Iwonder if events in the Orient Express on St Valentine's Day this year might be used as a paradigm for what is happening in Britain and America. The famous train offered the chance of a romantic meander through the Garden of England with a five- course lunch and unlimited champagne. Mr John Page, 29, an unemployed carpenter from Lewisham, took his girlfriend, Leila Parker, for a treat, but then they both got rather drunk and started bickering. Miss Parker decided that a married couple hav- ing a pleasanter time at the next table was laughing at her and complained to Page, who punched the man — a 38-year-old company director from Olney, Bucking- hamshire — several times in the face. While champagne glasses and crockery crashed around him, the drunken Page stumbled and fell. Wrongly supposing he had been tripped, he kicked a 51-year-old engineer in the head. It all ended in front of Horseferry Road magistrates with £350 in fines and compensation to be paid by the taxpayer.
I am not, of course, saying it is wrong that an unemployed carpenter from Lewisham should be able to afford to take his girlfriend on a luxury outing of this sort. I am merely pointing out that it doesn't add to the fun for other passengers. Polite occa- sions of this sort can only be enjoyed by those who are willing and able to behave politely, and it is an unfortunate result of the promised shift of wealth and power to the lower classes and their families that the old standards of politeness do not apply. The burden of my song is that bad manners are not only disagreeable in themselves, but also counter-productive. The social revolu- tion of the last 35 years has produced prac- tically nothing but muddle, inefficiency, and resentment.
Last week the Parliamentary Ombuds- man reported an unprecedented decline of standards in the way civil servants treat the public. In the same week we learned that senior civil servants had made an unprece- dented complaint, about the rudeness of four (unnamed) government ministers, to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler. Accusations include verbal abuse and swearing.
On this last point it is not easy to take sides until we have heard the background, and how much provocation was given. It would be easy to agree with Peter Mandel- son — 'Civil servants should be heard with courtesy and respect. It is no wonder that the Government is forced to make U-turns on half-baked legislation when it is not lis- tening to advice' — until one reflects on the amount of half-baked legislation which has been initiated entirely, one supposes, on departmental advice. Mrs Bottomley's disastrous Health of Britain campaign is an obvious example. Perhaps a more abrasive relationship between ministers and advisers is sometimes to be encouraged, but nothing is to be gained by rudeness. Any policy imposed that way will be sabotaged by the department concerned from top to bottom.
At the beginning of the article I men- tioned America as another place where the polite bourgeois culture is losing its grip. No doubt the move has been greatly encouraged by the arrival of the hamburg- er-guzzling new President, whose support- ers make so much capital out of the fact that he came from the wrong side of the tracks, i.e., from the lower-middle class. It would not be polite to invite them to con- sider that the last five British prime ministers similarly came from the wrong side of the tracks, and look where we are now.
At times, rudeness is treated as a virtue, rather than as an unfortunate failure in education. When the new editor of New York Magazine, Mr Kurt Andersen, arrived, he sacked the art critic, Kay Larson, of 14 years' service, and the book reviewer, Rhoda Koenig, of 17 years' service on the magazine, by fax. In Koenig's case, a two- sentence message — no expression of appreciation or regret, no offer of sever- ance payment to sweeten the blow. Koenig, who lives in London, I observe, has been reduced to writing about sex education in this week's Sunday Times. No doubt some respectable newspaper or magazine will snap her up before long, but that is the sort of thing which can happen to women in London who are suddenly cut off from their main means of support. No doubt the unpleasant-sounding Kurt Andersen thinks he has behaved in a tough and businesslike way, but what sort of writer does he sup- pose will be prepared to work for him with the prospect of being treated like that? I certainly wouldn't, and I should imagine that only the most craven, desperate and unemployable members of my profession would be tempted.
Perhaps I am being unfair to Andersen; perhaps his bad manners are not deliber- ate. In that case we should blame his moth- er, but it seems to me that there has been something of an epidemic of bad mothers across the herring pond. In London we have had the embarrassing spectacle of the American ambassador, Mr Raymond Seitz, being publicly humiliated and left hanging from a limb by his own State Department for the past six months. Throughout that time nobody told him whether he would be asked to stay, or when he should go, or where he should go. Seitz is not only the politest of men (as well as being the best public speaker in London), but he has also been a brilliantly successful ambassador, explaining his country's position in well- mannered, intelligent English at a time of some considerable difficulty in Anglo- American relations. The fact that he was prepared to use the forum of Any Ques- tions? for this purpose — something no ambassador had ever thought or needed to do before — speaks for itself.
If one looks at the new United States emphasis on countries of the Pacific rim, we see that most of the countries being courted have already been gravely offended by this new American boorishness, whether by Mr Clinton personally, or by Warren Christopher, his disastrous Secretary of State: first Japan, by Clinton's fumbling request for import targets; next Indonesia, criticised by the State Department for its policy towards dissidents; then Thailand, over workers' rights; next Singa- pore, where Mr Clinton personally inter- venes on behalf of an American youth sen- tenced to be chastised for his loutish behaviour. Finally, Mr Christopher goes in person to Beijing to say that bilateral trade would be linked to China's treatment of student dissidents.
It looks as if America's Pacific rim policy may be over before it has started. Seitz will be a sad loss for London, but he would be a disastrous loss for the State Department, which seems to have been taken over by a collection of fourth-grade Sunday school teachers. On the other hand, I see no rea- son why we should worry on their behalf. If he can be persuaded to stay in Britain in some academic post, or as head of an Oxford or Cambridge college, that would cause the greatest happiness to his many friends here. We can't worry too much about those badly brought-up Sunday school teachers in Washington.
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