"Some conventions are worth respecting and don't need to be reinvented," she said.
Privacy is very much worth respecting, but not when one man's desire for it destroys another man's credibility.
The only rule worth respecting, say motorists, is to keep away from police vehicles: they tend to explode.The authorities blame the violence on Islamic revolutionaries.
Still, it is marked enough and widespread enough to be worth respecting, and from our own narrow national perspective it is welcome.
Elements of the left, rather perversely, help the Conservatives when they talk as if Labour did nothing worth respecting with its longest span in office.
"The argument that people who are in the minority are somehow deviant, not worth respecting or making crazy arguments," she said, "just doesn't hold up".
By the mid-2000s, she was enthusiastically championing embryo-destroying stem cell research, pooh-poohing the idea that "a leftover frozen embryo" had any moral status worth respecting when cures might be at stake.
When the Internet was young, the reason to clean it up was basic human empathy — the idea that one's friends and neighbors, at home or on the other side of the world, were worth respecting.
Dilys Powell in 1957: 'He has been the ironic or mournful runaway, the unlucky killer, the man who trots waving behind the train, misses the boat, gets entangled with a slut, all this, and yet always worth respecting and worth desiring.' Jean Renoir: 'Gabin was at his most expressive when he did not have to raise his voice.
