Issuu

Just Good Manners

‘Incredibly interesting and very funny’ The Times

William Hanson

The Sunday Times bestselling author

Just Good Manners

William Hanson

About the Author

William Hanson is the leading expert in telling people how terribly uncivilised they are – but in the most polite way possible. Whether you’re royalty, a reality-TV reject, or someone who tragically thinks clinking glasses is correct, William has made it his life’s mission to rescue you from your own social ruin.

William Hanson

William is director of The English Manner, the leading British etiquette training institute, where he advises on gracious living to anyone who will listen, including VIP households, multinational companies, educational institutes and private clients.

His career has taken him from candlelight suppers with the cognoscenti to the murkier marshes of social media, where he bravely battles the forces of bad behaviour, one viral clip at a time.

Widely regarded as one of Britain’s freshest and most trusted authorities on etiquette, William’s ‘day job’ is as director of The English Manner, a leading UK etiquette training institute, where he advises individuals, organisations and films on correct form and good manners. He is also known for appearances on television, radio and, most notably, his podcast, Help I Sexted My Boss, which regularly leads the Apple Podcasts and Spotify charts. In 2021, he also launched Keeping Up Appearances: The Luxury Podcast. William is the author of four books, including the Sunday Times bestseller Help I S*xted My Boss (2023). William was the on-set etiquette advisor for the Amazon Prime Video film Red, White and Royal Blue and, for some reason, holds two Guinness World Records for etiquette, set in 2012 and 2019.

As well as being an etiquette coach and author, he co-hosts Help I Sexted My Boss (where he attempts to civilise Jordan North) and The Luxury Podcast (where he tries to avoid being asphyxiated by Jonathan Vernon-Smith’s Spanish cleaning products).

He curtsies before bed and was born wearing cufflinks.

Also by William Hanson

Bluffer’s Guide to Etiquette

Bluffer’s Guide to Entertaining

Protocol to Manage Relationships Today (co- author)

Help I S*xted My Boss (with Jordan North)

Good Manners

Just Good Manners

William Hanson

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To Granny, who gave me the etiquette book that launched a thousand ships.

‘When in Rome, do as the British do.’

Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, To the Manor Born

Preface

In Britain, no social issue is bigger than whether cream or jam is the first to be added to a scone. The second biggest is the pronunciation of the word ‘scone’ – it rhymes with ‘gone’, by the way. Don’t argue – the King says it like that, and it’s his English.

If I had a pound for every time I have been asked by a journalist, a student or a correspondent on social media what my take on the jam-versus-cream debate is, I would not be writing this book. I would be far too busy getting expensively bronzed and preparing to host an al fresco dinner at my Messelian villa on Mustique.

Every six months or so, the cream/jam debate comes back around in the British press, often prompted by the actions of someone of note. During the electioneering of 2015, the then prime minister David Cameron visited a cafe in Barnstaple, Devon, and pronounced that, in Devon, you add jam first and then cream to scones – which, for those new to this matter of life and death, is the Cornish way, not the Devonian. This was a very serious breach of local custom. You can imagine the uproar. It’s a miracle he wasn’t removed from office and terrorised by the clotted-cream resistance faction, known as the OoRA . William and Catherine – who, please note, currently hold the titles of Duke and Duchess of Cornwall – weighed into the clotted-cream quagmire in 2023. Catherine said she preferred cream last, while William remained diplomatic and didn’t give an explicit answer. Devon and Cornwall are the lead producers of clotted cream, and, aside from their dairy production, these two most south-westerly counties in England famously like to find ways to annoy each other. I suspect their

distinct edicts on where to stick the cream came about as an example of this.

When I teach afternoon-tea etiquette, which sometimes is several times a day (in 2014, I had seventy-two teas), I aver that if you are eating a scone in Devon, do cream first, and if you are in Cornwall, cream last. If you are elsewhere in the world, do it however you so please. Like the Prince of Wales, I prefer to be neutral and suggest doing one half one way, and the other half the other.*

Brits from the south-west reading this may have possibly thrown the book across the room, because I have not decreed that one way is preferable to the other. It’s a weird quirk of British etiquette that we have decided such a little detail matters, and that those who disagree are to be treated with great suspicion. But it is representative of the eccentricities of our nation’s behavioural codes and customs.

In a similar vein, I was once away for work, deep in Riyadh. I was there to teach international business protocol at a leading Saudi bank – then a twice-annual booking. That particular afternoon’s session took an unusual turn when, during a scheduled discussion on boardroom seating dynamics, one of the twelve graduates (it was always ten men and two women) queried why I had just ﬂagged, as a passing thought, that in Britain none of us would be able to sit down to eat together, as we were a group of thirteen.

‘But why should that be an issue?’ I was gently interrogated.

‘Well, Abdulaziz, in Britain we say that thirteen cannot sit down for any lunch or dinner, or else one of the party may die.’ Only

* Incidentally, the island of Jersey also produces very good clotted cream. They have no strong feeling either way on whether it goes before or after the jam, just so long as it’s taxed as little as possible.

after being rechallenged on this did I have a heart-in-mouth moment when I realised I was about to start extemporising about the New Testament in a deeply conservative Muslim country.

But, to both my surprise and my relief, after I had carefully explained how there were thirteen during the ‘last supper’ and that this had led to Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and the latter’s crucifixion, none of the group seemed bothered by my synoptic summary. Instead, my pragmatic students wanted to know how we in Britain coped at Christmas if, by chance, there were thirteen in the family. Did we disinvite Granny? Did we build a second dining room?

‘No, it’s perfectly simple,’ I started with a broad smile. ‘What some British families do is that we set the table for fourteen people, get an old teddy bear from the nursery, and we pop it on the fourteenth chair and invite the teddy to join us for lunch.’

As I stopped talking, I surveyed my students’ stunned faces. They clearly thought that I, along with those in Britain who would do this, had completely lost the plot. To me, and I dare say to many native British readers, the teddy bear solution seems perfectly normal and rational. Teddies are part of the family – in fact, many traditional British (‘trad Brits’) give more love and affection to their Steiffs than their actual blood relatives. Only when I had to explain this bear-on-the-chair to my Arab cohort did I realise that, on paper, it is completely ludicrous.*

* Since 1920, The Savoy has had Kaspar, a black wooden cat that is placed in a fourteenth seat should thirteen sit down to eat. The cat replaced the workaround the hotel had previously been using, of having a waiter take the fourteenth place. Architect Basil Ionides created Kaspar during a renovation of the private dining room. Why he picked a cat, no one knows, but to this day the cat sits in the hotel’s lobby, ready to be put to use to avoid the untimely death of a diner.

Whether it’s the order for scone toppings, pronunciation debates or teddy bears, British manners are a bit weird. Weird but wonderful. While Italy may hold the crown for food and art, France for fashion and Germany for efficient engineering, in Britain we can just about still wear the crown for courtesy. Over many centuries, we Brits have taken hold of general good manners and put our own layer of politesse over the top, making us the market leader in the subject.

Thank heavens I was born in Britain and that I do the job I do. As I have no talents in life except teaching etiquette, it would have been tricky to be from anywhere else. Can you imagine if I had been born in Australia, and rocked up to teach napkinfolding to a tech start- up in Wagga Wagga? Or if I were Norwegian, and dared try to discuss how to split a scone in Fredrikstad? I’m just not sure it would have worked.

There are, of course, excellent etiquette consultants in both countries who do a sterling job, but I’m not sure the Saudis would have asked an Aussie or a Norwegian to go all that way to talk business etiquette. My nationality has made my work life a lot easier.

Teaching etiquette was not a career I set out to pursue initially. Just before my grandmother gave her slightly precocious eldest grandson his first etiquette book, I had been considering a career either reading the news, entering the world of espionage, or as the Archbishop of Canterbury (not for any particular religious reason, but the vestments looked quite fun). But my life began to change once I opened my copy of John Morgan’s offering for Debrett’s. Suddenly there was a subject that was staying put in my head. I struggled to remember anything our history teacher was saying about Pobedonostsev, and I failed to muster any enthusiasm for trigonometry, but my brain fired on all cylinders when it came to learning that, for a buffet, a tablecloth must be to the ﬂoor.

Knowing these rules and guidelines appealed to my precious nature, and helped me gain an edge over my peers. We were all meant to know about Russian statesmen and maths equations, but I wanted to be different and have the advantage of etiquette.

As great as John Morgan’s book was – and if this book is a tenth as good as his, I will be delighted – it posed lots of questions for twelve-year-old William. It was all very well for Mr Morgan to tell us the rules, but some clarification or explanation would have been nice. I started to buy more books on etiquette, reading around the subject, and luckily began to get some answers.

My interest in the subject has since become all-consuming. Not a moment goes by when I am not pondering the polite. Indeed, the brilliant Camilla Long of the Sunday Times once described me as ‘utterly consumed by napkins and the correct sort of loafer’. It means I can’t ever really switch off, be deliberately rude to someone, or walk to the post box in my pyjamas. When I am rude to someone – always unintentionally – as both a manners maven and a Brit I often dive into a catastrophic spiral of panic. When one spends their life advising others on the correct course of action and how best to do things, any transgression of this, especially when completely unintentional, is akin to breaching the law.

Even though many think of what I do as niche, it’s not. Passing on instruction in the correct way to do things is a very old profession – albeit not as old as some. While the men of the eighteenth century were galivanting around Europe on their ‘grand tours’, learning about the arts, gambling, sex and finance, their female counterparts were ‘finished’ at home. Think about Dickens’s Mrs General (from Little Dorrit ) who, although fictitious, is a dramatic embodiment of widowed women of a certain age who were brought in by aspirational families to help polish their charges, who were about to launch themselves onto the social scene and the marriage market.

The late nineteenth century saw the rise of finishing schools. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the middle class of Britain had expanded tenfold. Daughters from these newly aspirational families were sent to learn critically vital life skills, such as how to laugh to a scale, get in and out of a carriage while protecting their modesty, and where to stick a hardy perennial red-hot poker. And it wasn’t just Britain that had such schools. Many European countries did too. Switzerland arguably led the way, offering Alpine entertainment and tuition on the slopes, and the Swiss culture of consensus gave them the edge over their competitors. Once girls had passed through these finishing schools and their rigorous academic standards, they were eligible for marriage.

Finishing schools survived well into the twentieth century, the most famous British institutions being Winkfield Place and Lucie Clayton’s – the latter of which clung on until the 1990s, when it began to focus on secretarial and business skills. As a result, the finishing and etiquette side was absorbed into The English Manner, a company I am now proud to own and run. Other than Institut Villa Pierrefeu in Switzerland, which remains in operation today, the schools in Britain and Europe wilted as most of them never updated their curriculum to reﬂect the society around them and the rise in the equality of the sexes from the 1960s onwards.* Those poor girls were still toying with red-hot pokers while the carriages had been switched for motorcars and The Beatles were making miniskirted girls scream as they adjusted their Quants ever upwards.

* Institut Villa Pierrefeu opened in 1954, moving to Montreux in 1965. Principal Mme Viviane Neri has a good take on the role of finishing schools and etiquette institutions: ‘We don’t finish anyone: we start them by giving them tools that regular schools have not and open their eyes to the benefits of multicultural social interaction.’

For centuries, Britain led the way in educating the world in manners, not just through etiquette education but by producing books that offered advice on ‘the done thing’, such as the Boke of Curtasye (1440), Youth’s Behaviour; or, Decency in Conversation Among Men (1640), Philip Stanhope’s Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Gentleman (1774), and more recently when Debrett’s, who up until the 1980s had only collated the names and lineage of living aristocracy to produce a glorified Yellow Pages, entered the etiquette publishing world with their first guide, authored by Elsie Burch Donald.

Dare I say that maybe even the former British Empire and its diplomats contributed to holding up our mantle as etiquette tutors to the world. While France and Italy also sought to codify standards of behaviour, they bloodily got rid of their royal families – while ours survives, and those within it still conduct themselves with grace and poise despite the odd spectacular blip here and there.

But are the British and our manners the envy or joke of other nations? Recently, I was posted to Oman for six weeks on an assignment working with the Diwan (the royal court). Together with Jean Paul, my Dutch colleague, we decided that given the nature of our work and the ongoing pandemic, we should let our respective ambassadors know we would be in Muscat, the country’s capital, for a longer-than-normal period of time. As it happened, our emails crossed.

I opened Jean Paul’s missive to the Dutch ambassador. ‘Dear Laetitia,’ it efficiently and casually began. I winced. He’d never met her! A first-name basis? The cheek of it. A few scant, matterof-fact lines about our posting followed, before the unceremonious sign-off ‘Yours sincerely, Jean Paul’. Yours sincerely?! That’s how I might close an email to the council about a missed bin collection, not how one should communicate with the permanent representative of a royal head of state.

Cut to my email to the British ambassador, which struck a remarkably more formal tone. ‘Your Excellency,’ it began. I was genuﬂecting as low as I could go as I typed. Umpteen waffly paragraphs followed, over-explaining everything Jean Paul had managed to express in just a few concise sentences, before my big finish. I concluded (deep breath): ‘I have the honour to be, with the highest consideration, Your Excellency’s obedient servant.’ I was now metaphorically prostrate on the ﬂoor.

Funnily enough, someone from the British Embassy only got back to me on the penultimate day of our six-week trip; the ambassador of the Netherlands personally replied to Jean Paul within thirty-six hours. But at least I knew I had followed protocol.

What did Jean Paul make of my obsequious email? Did he feel bad about his informality, or did he forward the email to his colleagues to show how weird we are in Britain? We’ve always done deference quite well in Britain, of course. We may not be as deferential as we once were – the sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s saw to that – but when it comes to terms of address and noting rank, we still lead the way.

My British audience has always been the trickiest throughout my career. When I teach in China, it’s a much easier ‘act’ to perform, as I’ve found they will sit there and listen diligently, perhaps thanks to their more intense educational conditioning. I’ve never needed to resort to jokes or witty asides. If anything, it’s a bit dull for me. Brits really do need a spoonful of sugar to help the mannerly medicine go down. And should gentle teasing and arch humour not work, Brits love history. Why do we do it, who made us do it, and for how long have we been doing it that way?

Further modification is needed when I teach in America, as the history has to be stripped away. When I was in New York City, I

referenced the Roman Empire, and one of the students asked if that was the one that ended in late 1800s. Americans are much more training-focused as a nation. Perhaps due to their comparative youth as a country, they don’t bristle as much at the thought of group learning or admitting they may not know something.

In Britain, we get so many people who don’t want others to know they have had tutorage in manners. I see people who like to appear they know it all, or don’t need to learn as the whole thing is a bit beneath them; they have persuaded themselves into thinking we are some uber-egalitarian, laid-back, fancy-free society and don’t need to worry about other people and how our actions affect them. Though, not wanting to bad-mouth that sort of person too much, I shall defend them by saying they may have a soupçon of sense. Etiquette has certainly changed since it was most popularly codified in the court of Louis XIV.

Back then, when little signs and labels were placed around palaces like Versailles to keep the patrician paysans in their place, rules were made up to elevate Louis, giving him a godlike aura and excluding others who were so conscious of their behaviour that they’d be on edge – so eager to impress that they wouldn’t dream of questioning authority. You couldn’t look at the royalty, you couldn’t sit in front of royalty or speak until you were spoken to. I’m told life is still like that today for those living and working in a certain house in Montecito. But with the exception of that 18,000square-foot, sixteen-bathroomed mansion in California, etiquette today is – when used correctly – much more inclusive. A change which anyone can track by reading the tomes of correct behaviour published over the last few hundred years.

In my eyes, etiquette manuals throughout history have two main uses. Their primary function at the time of their writing was to help lubricate social interactions with fellow human beings. Many

believe that children generally do better with rules and frameworks within which to live; adults are no different. Their second function, which only becomes apparent years later, is to reﬂect how life was at that point, to educate and inform future generations. Some of my naysayers think my colleagues and I only teach people a code of conduct from the court of George III , or – if we’re feeling modern – that we advocate for a return to Victorian manners. What they don’t see is the evolution of etiquette – how it’s a malleable shapeshifter that must always adapt to the society of the day. Etiquette is as much about addressing an ambassador as it is about brushing off something objectionable someone might have said – a perennial issue, but one we seem to encounter more today.

Things we may have grown up learning are correct may become incorrect as life moves on. I used to have quite fascist views on doggie bags, but have since had an epiphany that in an age of obscene food waste and with many in life starving, they are actually marvellous – but only if the restaurant offers one (it’s still not great form to ask).

In these pages, I have tried to find a sensible balance between what has been accepted for many years (much of which either is still correct or can be easily adapted to life today), what is a load of outdated rubbish, and where new gaps in knowledge needed to be filled.

You may use as much or as little as you like of what follows in this book. Use it to add some finesse to your already wonderful life, to laugh along with your fellow Brits – or, if you aren’t British yourself, you might use it to understand us and how we behave today.

CHAPTER ONE

A

Manifesto for Manners

I will now mount my soapbox.

Etiquette and good manners are needed more than ever. You can’t scroll through a news app or swipe on social media without seeing someone attacking someone else, being discourteous or not doing the right thing. Culprits will argue that civility is no longer relevant, and that we are now in a totally different world where anything goes. Personal choice and freedom have, they say, replaced the need for observing the little courtesies and pleasantries. It’s dog-eat-dog. But I contend that the people who make this argument are (badly) trying to disguise their own ignorance of the rules and accepted norms. They probably fail to realise that many of the principles of good manners have evolved over time. Some have been adjusted with trial and error, others by common sense, and the rest have their origins in our rich history. However they have been formed, most of the principles of politeness will outlast the naysayers, because most of us still want to treat others well.

On other occasions, out there in the wilderness, I find specimens who agree that manners are needed, but that etiquette is not. Lunacy! You cannot have manners without etiquette. Yes, they are

different, but they are also a married couple. And like any married couple, sometimes they disagree and contradict each other. But, contretemps aside, ultimately they are a unit.

Manners are the guiding principles of putting people at their ease, of not embarrassing others, and of generally putting yourself second. Good manners are selﬂess, not selfish. All cultures around the globe believe in the importance of good manners. Etiquette, on the other hand, is a set of rules by which a society lives. How you become well-mannered is (nine times out of ten) by following the rules of etiquette. There are times when the rules will not be appropriate, and when actually the politest thing is to do quite the opposite to what the rulebook says . . . But more often than not, the correct etiquette is exactly that – correct! To be the most wellmannered person in the room, you need to know the rules of etiquette and have the confidence to break those rules at the appropriate moment.

There is an apocryphal story, allegedly involving Charles III when he was Prince of Wales. Supposedly, during an offi cial dinner for a visiting dignitary from a developing country, fi nger food was served and cut- glass fi nger bowls were set above the forks, as is the custom. Said distinguished guest innocently mistook the fi nger bowl for his water glass, picked it up and started drinking from it. Some British guests saw and started to quietly laugh and point. Charles, noticing this, picked up his own fi nger bowl and drank from it to silence them and make the guest of honour feel at ease.

While it is definitely not etiquette to drink from a finger bowl, it is very bad manners to laugh at someone who does, especially when they are from a country where they have more pressing things to worry about than finger-bowl finesse. That same story is told with a variety of protagonists, from Queen Wilhelmina of the

Netherlands to Jacqueline Kennedy, so we may never know who it really was – if it was anyone at all – but being patriotic and shamelessly hoping for a gong one day, I attribute it to our now King.

‘Etiquette’ has become a loaded word. Its grander French etymology adds some off-putting gilding. It may be hard for someone who has had a far-from-royal upbringing to think they need to observe the rules of etiquette. But every situation involves a code of behaviour, whether people like it or not. It’s not just about who is presented to whom at court; it’s how to handle break-ups with grace and to let a restaurant know you are still coming the day before. I dare say there is even etiquette around a gangland drug exchange So long as humans interact with one another, there will be the need for etiquette and manners.

I do accept that some people can use etiquette for improper means, however. The television show Ladette to Lady – which brieﬂy aired in America as The Girls of Hedsor Hall, executive produced by Donald Trump – was a prime example of etiquette gone rogue. To be fair to those involved, they were victims of the era of car-crash television (although they did go along with it for multiple series). But showing coiff ured harridans screaming at Jemma, jailed for ﬂashing her breasts in Faliraki as she exited a hatchback clumsily, was never going to be good PR for politeness.

Shows like these failed to acknowledge that etiquette evolves and changes rather than being frozen in a bygone era. Where it was once about gaining skills to catch a husband or preparing to inherit the family seat, today etiquette helps us progress at work, make friends from all walks of life, and simply become a kind, compassionate person whom others want to be around. Granted, we are using rules that have been around for some time, many of which were codified in a more gilded habitat, but, at their core, they are applicable anywhere.

Some of the etiquette we still use today does originate from a more rarefied environment. Particularly in Britain, it is hard to separate it from social class. Even now, with a far less rigid class structure than in previous centuries, much focus is put on class as we’re so obsessed with it – with each of us, whether secretly or openly, aspiring to a perceived greatness (though each person will define greatness in their own way). It’s become taboo to acknowledge that we still have a class structure. But the more we talk about something and acknowledge it, gently mocking it where it needs to be mocked, the less of an issue it will be.

During the exploration of modern manners within these pages, there will be many references to ‘posh’ versus ‘common’. Brace yourselves. This is Britain. For readers from this blessed plot, I hate to break it to you, but if you don’t like the fact that we have this additional arch and snobby layer to our behaviour codes, you may want to consider emigrating. It’s not going to vanish, however much you may want it to. Britain is too much of an old country with a verdant history for it to go. On the other hand, if you take it all too seriously, you are going to give it more weight than it arguably deserves. Much of it is pure snobbery and just a cashmerecovered sociolect, though some of what is dismissed as classism is actually specificity. For instance, a ‘toilet’ was historically your make-up and appearance, not the white china thing into which you had a wee. That’s a ‘lavatory’ or ‘loo’.

The insecure French Sun King, Louis XIV, bequeathed us a fair number of the dining rules followed around the world. In his court, if you dared open your napkin before him, there would be tears before bedtime as you were dropped down the order of precedence. Today, this rule still applies, although hardly anyone will notice if you ﬂ ick open your napkin a beat too early. (Don’t dramatically waft it to one side of you, however, or you might take someone’s eye out.)

But as life has morphed into the shape it is currently, new rules have come from ‘the people’ rather than from the ruling families. I am quite sure that most of the British aristocracy have not given much thought to inclusive language, for example. That’s not to say they would disagree with the inclusive reasoning behind it, but as they still have not updated their own primogeniture rules, worrying about pronouns and gender-neutral language is probably nowhere near the top of their agendas.*

The world is very different to how it was in the respective days of Pride and Prejudice ’s Elizabeth Bennet and Downton Abbey ’s Lord and Lady Grantham. Thanks to the ease of international travel and the internet, the world has become much smaller, and we interact with people far more often and at a quicker pace than any of our predecessors. Since COVID - 19, we easily meet people from all over the world on video calls, driving globalised communication even further than we could have anticipated before the pandemic. While taking the time to do things with courtesy, respect for others and self- respect may slow us down, it is only infi nitesimally. And if you know the rules and are confi dent with them, they become second nature. I always give the analogy of driving a car. Unless you are the next best thing to Lando Norris when you fi rst learn to drive, you will be so worried about keeping the car on the road, and going in a straight

* Primogeniture is the right, usually by law, of the firstborn legitimate child to inherit the parent’s entire or main estate. In most contexts, it means the inheritance of the firstborn son. There was an attempt to change British law in 2013 with the Equality (Titles) Bill, but it was rejected at committee stage in the House of Lords. The British Royal Family did, however, abolish male-preference primogeniture as of 2015, which is why Princess Charlotte of Wales outranks her younger brother, Prince Louis of Wales. Anne, the Princess Royal, however, is outranked by both her younger brothers (the Duke of York and the Duke of Edinburgh), as the changes were not retrospective and only affect those born after 28 October 2011.

line without hitting any passing pensioners, that you won’t be able to make chit- chat with your instructor, have the radio on or check your hair in the mirror. But once you pass your test and have mastered your manoeuvring, all those things become instinctive – and your muscle memory takes over as you change gears and shift lanes. Etiquette should be like that. It is not a restrictive straitjacket to keep people in their place, but a series of tried- and- tested guidelines for an easy life with few crashes.

Contemporary British etiquette is rooted in six key principles.

Humility

Brits do not go in for shameless self-promotion. Indeed, many of us struggle to talk about ourselves in a positive light. This does not mean we lack self-worth, having been raised with very little praise or outward displays of love (although I am sure, for some people, that plays a part); it just equates to us not wanting other people to think we are being pushy or stepping out of place.

True humility is not merely the absence of arrogance but a refined expression of self-awareness – a knowing understatement that elevates the collective comfort over individual accolades. It is this artful modesty that oils the gears of our social machinery, ensuring that interactions are marked not by brash self-promotion but by a gracious, understated acknowledgement of one’s own place and achievements.

Consider my favourite sitcom character, Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances. She was funny to those watching, as the endless domestic rodomontade and perpetual varnishing of her life jarred with the usual British way of doing things, even though dear Hyacinth would have said she was British to the core.

While other nations may think we are a land of snobs, the humility many display is the opposite of boasting about achievements and triumphs, and making others feel like they have not achieved the same greatness. There is something very satisfying about the quiet confidence of knowing that you are right about something but not announcing it to everyone with bombastic conviction.

Hospitality

While Louis XIV may have devised his rules to prevent people from getting above their station, and to quash any potential revolution, in the hundreds of years since then, etiquette has evolved to include all people wherever possible. As we will see, the rules of table conversation evolved to ensure that the people on each side of you were spoken to equally during dinner, so that no one was excluded.

I promise I am not being sponsored by Visit Britain, but once again, we lead the way. Our hospitality is not merely by accident but by design – shaped by centuries of interaction, integration and inﬂ uence from across the globe. The British Isles have always been a crossroads of civilisations, ideas and peoples, each leaving an indelible mark on the country’s culture, cuisine and character – like the houseguest that leaves a mark on the herringbone wood block, but in these instances, a more palatable one.

Our education and legal frameworks further cement Britain’s commitment to inclusivity, promoting equality and protecting the rights of all citizens, regardless of their background. The school curriculum today, for instance, is designed to foster an understanding and appreciation of different cultures, religions, sexualities, genders and ways of life, preparing each generation to value diversity and realise there are many other worlds outside our own.