How to make your excuses

In the past I would have been interested in crafting plausible excuses for unforgivable social behaviour such as failing to turn up to events to which you had RSVP’d, missing a netjet or having said something genuinely appalling. One example: circa 1999, the late Rt Hon Alan Clark MP wrote to Dear Mary. He asked how, without losing face, he could apologise to someone he hugely admired, but to whom he had found himself being inexplicably rude at a party.

We all knew that Alan Clark was temperamental but his target had been Boris so he obviously couldn’t have meant the insults. I suggested Clark might laugh off the incident by attributing the incident to his ingestion of a certain sleeping pill, which had famously just been withdrawn from the market following findings that it could trigger uncharacteristic outbursts.