The Agreeable World of Wallace Arnold: Manners make a lord

I WONDER if anyone read my old friend and quaffing partner Nick Ridley's splendid article on the need for good manners gracing the pages of the Times last week? He began it in a lively, provocative fashion with the sentence: 'I happen to think that 'good manners' are very important.' Two thousand words later, he ended with a typically elegant flourish: 'I do think we should all strive to have good manners.'

In between, he put forward a closely argued case for tact, courtesy and consideration - if any of these words still have a scintilla of meaning in the latter half of the 20th century (dread era])

Nick - now Lord] - Ridley and I go back yonks, long before he rose to the giddy heights of Mrs Thatcher's cabinet. I first encountered him during his brief career as an actor, when he was creating the role of Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in the mid-Fifties. He brought real vigour and fury to the part, thumping that proverbial ironing board and swearing at his lady friend as if his life depended upon it.

But for some reason the good roles stopped coming his way, and after a brief, somewhat unsatisfactory, spell as a uniformed front-of-house manager at the Hammersmith Palais in the early Sixties, he decided to enter the fray of Conservative politics.

Following an early hiccup in front of the Sutton and Cheam constituency selection committee - asked by the chairman where he stood on the vexed question of an incomes policy he replied: 'What's it to you, fatface?' - Nick eventually found a safe seat in Cirencester, after his two fellow contenders had retired from the race, fortunately with only minor wounds to face and shins.

I'm happy to say we kept in close touch throughout his distinguished parliamentary career. He would often seek my advice over presentation, and I was only too happy to give it. For instance, in 1984, as Secretary of State for Transport, he called me in to help butter up angry members of the Railusers' Association distressed at the poor service offered by British Rail. 'I thought I'd start my speech with something along the lines of 'Piss off the lot of you, get off your fat arses, stop whining and why not buy yourselves a decent car if you hate the trains so much' - or do you think I should be a bit tougher with them, Wallace?'

I told him perhaps something like, 'We are holding out great hopes for a radically improved service in the years to come', might be more the thing, and he agreed, albeit grudgingly. Needless to say, the Railusers' Association fell for it, Nick earned high praise for his emollient approach and before long he had been promoted to Secretary of State for the Environment.

At Environment, he found himself facing the heavily bearded and besandalled Green Brigade, with their endless catalogue of pernickety demands for saving the world. Over an excellent dinner of dolphin pate and Roulade of Endangered Species, he asked me what I thought of the first draft of his opening speech for the One World Environment Conference at the Barbican. I read it through with much interest before making my comment.

'Are you sure that kicking your speech off by saying, 'If only all you lily-livered smartypants would have the common courtesy to drop down dead, you'd make my life one helluva lot easier', will be viewed as striking quite the right note of give-and-take?' I asked him. After some argument, he agreed to change it to: 'May I, on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, welcome you all here today, and assure you that we are all of us deeply committed to the future of this super planet.' In the event, it went down very well.

And so to last week's article on good manners. When I dropped into his office to help, he was thrilled to see me. 'I'm sick to bloody death with all this swearing' he muttered, 'and everyone's so damn rude thse days. Yesterday, I told an old lady to shove off, and, d'y'know, she didn't have the common courtesy to reply] Put these thoughts into decent English for me, Wallace.'

'Only,' I replied, 'if you say 'please'.'