As a father from hell, I forced my sons to be polite. I wish I now had the same influence over Corbyn’s yobs

YEARS ago, I had a friend who took a holiday job working as a nanny for a nightmare couple in London — he a producer of right- on, socially conscious TV documentaries, she a child psychologist from New York.

My friend was shocked by the lousy manners of her employers’ two spoilt young offspring and spent most of her waking hours trying to teach them the basics of their Ps and Qs.

One glorious morning at breakfast, she placed a bowl of cereal in front of one of her charges . . . and, to her astonishment and delight, the little girl whispered: ‘Thank you.’

Though the words were barely audible, my friend was jubilant. At last, her tireless efforts seemed to be bearing fruit.

Yet, far from sharing her employee’s pleasure, the child’s American mother was distraught. With tears brimming in her eyes, she told her little daughter: ‘Gee, honey, you don’t have to say thank you!’ And all nanny’s work was undone.

Since I was told about that exchange, I’ve been wondering quite why my friend’s employer was so upset by her daughter’s uncharacteristic display of politeness.

I suppose the answer must be that in this age of #MeMeMe (or whatever it’s called), nothing is deemed more vital to our mental wellbeing than our self-esteem.

Gratitude

And, as every child seems instinctively to understand, even the smallest gesture of courtesy, respect or gratitude to a fellow human being — a ‘please’, a ‘sorry’ or a ‘ thank you’ — is a tiny act of selfabasement, an acknowledgement that other people’s feelings are at least as worthy of recognition as our own.

If this theory is true, then heaven knows how much psychological damage my wife and I must have inflicted on our own four sons and their self-esteem when they were growing up, as we tried to drum into them the importance of good manners.

I recall countless occasions on which I fetched our young from their friends’ birthday parties and had to hiss at them through clenched teeth as they said their goodbyes: ‘Now, what do you say?’

At this, whichever boy it was would stare at his shoes and chant, slowly and grudgingly, in the ding-dong tones of the Avon lady’s doorbell chimes: ‘Thanggg . . . Kyeeew.’ But this father from hell would never leave it at that. ‘Now, look Fred’s mummy in the eye,’ I would tell him, ‘and say it as if you really mean it.’

Only after years of this treatment (‘there, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?’) did the boys start to express gratitude convincingly and without prompting — though I’m sorry to record that they never quite got the hang of being polite to their father.

Today, if an international study this week is to be believed, there are still a great many of us sticklers for courtesy in this country (though, I suspect, we may be a dying breed). Indeed, researchers at the universities of Sydney, York and Helsinki claim to have found that we British say ‘thank you’ more often than the people of any other nation on the planet.

Before we congratulate ourselves too extravagantly, however, they add that even we say it on only one in seven occasions when others perform a service for us and gratitude may be considered in order.

As for how the researchers arrived at this conclusion, it seems they examined hours of footage of people interacting in domestic settings all over the world — from Australia to Eurasia, Africa and South America — and recorded how they reacted when they received help in response to requests such as: ‘Could I have some water?’

Writing in the Royal Society journal Open Science, they found that the Cha’palaa speakers of Ecuador never extended thanks to each other (there’s no word for it in their language, apparently), while Russians did so only 3 per cent of the time. We Brits scored highest, expressing some form of gratitude on 14.5 per cent of occasions.

On average, it seems, the people of the world say ‘thank you’ only once in 20 occasions when others have helped them — which makes our score of one in seven seem almost respectable.

Two things in particular surprised and interested me about this study. One was the researchers’ theory that it may not be because they’re rude or ungrateful that Cha’palaa speakers have never found a use for a word or phrase that means thank you. Rather, it could be because theirs is a highly integrated society.

Standards

As the report’s co-author Simeon Floyd puts it: ‘Very close-knit community ties allow people to co-operate without ever needing to say thanks.’

My other surprise — or, rather, regret — is that the researchers didn’t extend their study into the English- speaking world beyond the UK. I’d like to have learned more, because Americans (child psychologists aside) have been among the most polite people I’ve come across. In my experience, they positively gush with gratitude over the smallest kindness.

That said, it has sometimes been noted that Americans tend to say ‘please’ less often than the British — for example, when ordering food or drink (‘Can I get a Budweiser?’). But this is testimony, so it’s said, to an egalitarian society in which a willingness to serve each other is taken for granted and the word ‘please’ can be thought condescending.

What is certainly true is that one of the politest young men I’ve ever met was a Texan friend of our second son, who stayed for a delightful couple of days in which he insisted on addressing me as ‘sir’ and my wife as ‘ma’am’. Though we kept urging him to call us by our Christian names, Mrs U veritably squirmed with pleasure at his old-world, new-world courtesy.

But if we Brits really do hold the No. 1 in the global league tables for politeness, I can’t see us staying there long. Every day, I’m appalled by more evidence of declining standards in the nation’s manners.

Hale and hearty young people, plugged into phones, refusing to surrender their seats to old ladies on the bus . . . passengers pouring on to the Tube without waiting for others to get off . . . supermarket checkout girls chatting together, without so much as glancing at the customer they’re supposed to be serving . . . people spewing bile at strangers over the internet, without a thought for anyone but themselves . . .

Offensive

Paradoxically, among the worst offenders are followers of Jeremy Corbyn, that archhypocrite who likes to pose as a champion of ‘kinder, gentler politics’.

Bad enough are his own increasingly foultempered performances in the Commons, where he yells and spits at Theresa May across the Despatch Box at Prime Minister’s Questions (am I ridiculously old-fashioned in finding it distasteful for a man to address a lady in such a way?)

More offensive are his cheerleaders on the hard-Left. Take the Labour chairman’s aide, Paul Robertson, who posted on Facebook a photo of Mrs May wearing a smart hat, with the comment: ‘Lord help us!’ When another thuggish misogynist commented: ‘Do you have to keep putting pictures up of that ugly harridan?’ Mr Robertson replied: ‘She would look better with a noose around her neck.’

Or take the supposedly moderate chairman of Lewisham East Labour Party, who tweeted about the Shadow Foreign Secretary: ‘Emily Thornberry is too old for ISIS. They won’t make a sex slave of her. They’ll behead her and dump her in a mass grave.’ In another poisonous tweet, he ruminated: ‘Maybe she’d agree sex slavery to one man only, provided he didn’t sell her on or insist on gang rape.’

And theirs is a party so anxious to be seen as PC that it even allowed a male hoaxer to stand for a women- only job, after he claimed he self-identified as a female (though only on Wednesdays!).

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Commons Speaker described Leader of the House Andrea Leadsom as a ‘stupid woman’ and ‘f****** useless’.

With role models like these holding prominent positions in public life, how much longer can Britain expect to be seen as the world capital of courtesy? I’d give it about a week.