HOW you choose to speak depends, in my experience, on whether you require a respectful hearing or wish to risk a smack in the mouth.

On addressing a politician or a banker, it is proper to deploy the RP tones of a BBC announcer, so as to establish that you are talking down to such persons.

This will not, however, work with a 16-stone ruffian blocking your exit from a pub. For him, it is necessary to raise the register by at least an octave, dropping the odd aitch or two and repressing all expletives.

The important thing is that everyone in this country should have acquired, on leaving school, the trick of suiting the patter to the occasion. Very few school-leavers have done so. They go into the infants' class lisping and come out of the secondary department grunting, fodder for the hiring manager's contemptuous snub. Many cannot utter two clear sentences together on their mobiles. What employer dares to let them loose on an office telephone?

It is to redress this widespread inarticulacy that the government has assigned Sir Jim Rose, a former Ofsted chieftain, to improve the quality of spoken English in primary schools. Sir Jim's task is to endow every child, by the age of 11, with the ability to use fluent, intelligible English in formal settings; to teach them the difference between the acceptable patois of the playground and the essential verbal protocol of asking for something in a cafe or a shop.

Sir Jim, I fear, faces a tough fight. Some of his adversaries are in the teaching profession. They have been preaching, for over 30 disastrous years, the alleged iniquity of interfering with the 'innate' speech patterns of working-class children. These teachers however old-fashionably leftist their leanings, are middle-class people; so what gives them the moral right to keep the children of the housing estate branded on the tongue?

I am not, of course, talking about regional accents. These, though glorified mostly by people who themselves never use them, are rarely impediments to comprehension. It is even possible to grasp what a Scouser is saying if his vocabulary is as broad as its bronchitic delivery. I myself often revert to my own native Lancashire when chatting up a barmaid, and always when talking to my dog. No, accents are seldom a problem. What is is the inability to tune one's intonation to the context. There is more than one way to order a cup of coffee. Do it with a sullen grunt, and you deserve to get it thrown in your face. Do it with a lightish, smiling lilt and you may get a saucer with the cup. Especially, if you add a `please'.

Sir Jim's other main difficulty will be to overcome the insidious influence of popular culture. He will soon discover, if he hasn't already, that most children today learn their spoken English from EastEnders, that appalling daily chronicle of cockney jail-bait. That is why, from whichever part of the country they come, they pronounce such words as `city' and `creative' without a middle `t'.

You would never hear Kate Winslet doing that, unless she was playing a cheap strumpet. But the force of the soap's pseudo proletarianism has affected even her, causing her to express a sighing self-consciousness about being 'nicely spoken.' She regrets that her voice inhibits Berkshire folk from accepting her as an ordinary Reading girl.

But Kate isn't ordinary. She is a versatile film actress, capable of assuming any voice a role assigns to her, not excluding that of a trailer-park mid-west American dimwit. We can't all be actors, but in the manner of talking to others it is sociologically handy for us to play many parts. Casanova for the barmaid, Caligula for the conman, Confucius for the dog.

Duke Dave's battles with right and wrong

I doubt that Duke Dave Cameron's collaboration with the Liberals to let several thousand retired Gurkhas into the country has pleased his Tory rank and file. Indeed, some I have met are so enraged that they are talking of defecting.

I support the Duke's stance, of course, but fear he has yet to learn that he is leading a party far to the right of his admirably just inclinations.