Modern manners

In an age of corporate looting, insider trading, commercial gouging and crass commercialism, it is well to ask why we are picking on Didier Drogba for cheating. One tries to emulate one’s betters, and, as Matthew Norman wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, when a co-owner of Birmingham City has done time for pimping and makes his loot as a pornographer, why shouldn’t an overpaid African footballer try bending the rules? Elementary, my dear Roman. After all, if Abramovich can become Britain’s richest man by bending it like Beckham, cheating, diving and using one’s hand to set up a goal should be considered virtues, not vices. Sport follows society, and always has.

Modern Britain, like America, is a brutal, violent place, where middle-class values and elitism stick in the throats of the slobs that lord it over us. Levelling down is the message. Down with Eton and Harrow, down with good manners, down with intelligence and good taste.