How to avoid the Theresa May party fail in seven easy steps

Ah, le video of Theresa May – or as she is now known in Brussels, Billé Ne Pas de Maytes – being roundly ignored by fellow attendees at the recent EU summit is like every anxiety dream you’ve ever had made flesh, and an exquisite agony to watch. All the more so as we stare down the barrel of our more quotidian equivalent – the Christmas party season – and once again prepare to don our frocks (or suits, or an idiosyncratic mix of both – I run a non-binary, nonjudgmental, gender-fluid ship here. Just don’t finish your chosen ensemble with brown suede shoes, that’s all. There are limits) and enter the social fray.

There are, of course, a few things you can do to minimise potential embarrassments, which I append here in a handy list format for you to pin to the front door and use to refresh your increasingly Baileys-addled memory as the festivities wear on:

1. Don’t alienate 98 per cent of the room before you get there. No damning pre-party rants on Facebook, no pathologically self-aggrandising round robins, no sexual congress, however discreet, with multiple guests’ partners, no agreeing to take your country out of a geopolitical construct it’s taken 40 years to build and most of whose 500 million members think is working pretty well. Not saying you’re right, not saying you’re wrong. Just saying – you’re gonna get some Looks, ’kay?

2. Wear something striking. A grand’s worth of leather trousers, say, or some unexpected shoes. Gives people a way in. Something to kick off the conversation. See if you can get Topshop to make a Christmas sweater emblazoned with Mrs Thatcher’s “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing”. It will need a lot of appliqued reindeer to make it festive, but it will work. 3. Find the alcohol. Obvs. 4. Find the alcoholic. There’s no need to stand around awkwardly on your own. Just position yourself within the ambit of the loudest, drunkest person there so that you simply become an undifferentiated partaker in Jean-Claude’s – I mean, whoever’s – expansive bonhomie. Remember – there ain’t no party like a Jean-Claude – or whoever’s – party, chiefly because it’s going on all the time.

5. Have something to fiddle with. Necklaces, cigarettes, small dogs, crudités and dip. If you get truly desperate, dip the dog in the dip. Whatever the situation, it will change rapidly. Whether for the better or worse… well – will you honestly care?

6. Embrace your solitude. Channel the David Low cartoon of 1940. Be that lone British soldier standing at the foot of the White Cliffs of Dover after the fall of France, fist aloft – his isn’t clutching a canapé but yours can be – and cry to yourself “Very well, alone!”

7. Pull. Sex is so much easier than small talk.