The woman who tells me she once gave the notoriously difficult Kenneth Williams a telling off for rudeness and got him to apologise( "He was never rude again!") knows better than to get in between the egos of Ken Livingstone and Tory incumbent Boris Johnson.
Levels of customer service are still probably the worst of any European capital, but truly egregious rudeness and aggression are now the exception rather than the norm, as a whole generation of Muscovites who have travelled the world no longer find surly, Soviet-style service acceptable at home.
Headlines included: "Australians Are Trying to Decide if It's OK to Swear at Sheep" (Time): "Aussie Sheep Station Under Fire For Cursing At Animals" (Huffington Post); "How dare ewe: shear rudeness against sheep" (Nine News); "Shearer under fire for verbally abusing sheep" (The Times UK) and "Inequality on the rise as sheep abuse rears its ugly head" (The Australian).
He's also tetchy to the point of rudeness about going over his back story.
He is now accused of "clinical incompetence, professional negligence and appalling rudeness".
To avoid excessive rudeness, all Northern Irish parties may be excluded.
This apparent rudeness, however, is less a part of the man himself than of his hair and beard, of his shaggy sheepskin, and the loud deep tone of his voice.
Dorothea Negroponte of Greece muses, "Maybe we Europeans should throw Britain in the dustbin"; Sergio Zangaglia of Brussels urges Britain to have the "intellectual honesty" to leave the EU; Vincenzo Russo accuses The Economist of "preposterous arrogance"; a Parisian reader scolds us for "incredible rudeness".Why all this shock and horror?
If you ask me, rudeness is an under-rated quality in a politician.
Both were monstrously self-centred, permanently grumpy and capable of astonishing rudeness.
Such rudeness outrages Mrs Palin's supporters and makes them love her more.On policy, Mrs Palin's book is negligible.
