That was a very funny face that Condoleezza Rice made the other day as Javier Solana bore down on her, lips pursed for a kiss, at the Palestinian funding summit in Berlin. You'd hesitate to line the cat's litter tray with the newspaper in which it appeared, for fear of giving the creature nightmares.

Poor Condi. She had already endured with comparatively good grace the busses of a pick'n'mix selection of senior international diplomats: the squeeze with arm-grip and cheesy grin of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, the last-minute mouth-to-cheek swerve from the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the up-gazing pucker from the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is either several inches shorter than Condi or was standing on the step below her.

So perhaps it is no wonder that by the time the EU's foreign policy representative swooped down on her, gripping her by her primrose-clad elbows while extending lips bunched in a sea-anemone smooch, like that of the fearful Mummy in chandelier earrings and feather boa depicted by Ronald Searle in How to be Topp, above the caption “Goodbye darling. Give your little motherkins a kiss!”, the US Secretary of State's normally serene features involuntarily screwed themselves into a grimace that unmistakably announced: “Come any closer, punk, and I'll bite your great bulbous nose off!”

Still, I thought the point of being an amazingly powerful international diplomat was that by the time they let you out on your own at Middle East security conferences, they had reorganised your natural human instincts of wrath, revulsion, disgust, pity, outrage and so on, so that you had perfect mastery over them. I thought the difference between diplomats and the rest of us was the ability to maintain a demeanour of glassily dignified goodwill in situations where ordinary folk would be shrieking “Ew, ptui, ptui! Get away from me, you filfy old perv!” and scrubbing our mouths with our hankies.

I also imagined that, locked in a safe somewhere deep in the foreign ministry of every nation, there lay the etiquette book in which the assorted grips and clutches of international diplomacy were classified according to strict protocol and shared between the occupants of high office on a need-to-know basis. So, for example, if you are Gordon Brown meeting George Bush, you know in advance to prepare yourself for the King of the Jungle arm-drape across the shoulders with dangling hand; while if it's Signor Berlusconi advancing towards you along the red carpet, you can expect the Revenger's Tragedy combined hug and back-stab with thousand-yard stare round the side of your head at the pointing lenses of the assembled paparazzi.

In an appendix to this booklet, I imagined a subsidiary set of instructions for leaders' wives, so that while her husband is peering about at waist level to see if he can spot M Sarkozy, Sarah Brown, in crumpled Jaeger, has already composed herself for the double air kiss - Mwah! Mwah! with sweeping head-to-toe once-over that she will be receiving from the former supermodel, pop star and international fox Mme Sarkozy in immaculate Dior, about which she knows she can do not a thing. Beyond thinking that Mme S may be better dressed but at least she, Sarah Brown, is married to a man whose scalp is not continually bobbing up and down in her line of vision as she walks alongside him...

There is a certain charm in the idea of a scenario in which the vapid frigidities of protocol are abandoned and the intricate manoeuvrings of high diplomacy are conducted according to the participants' natural instincts. The Russians have always excelled at inappropriate displays of public emotion - Khrushchev's shoe-pounding tantrum at the UN in 1960; Yeltsin giving it large in tie-clip and elephant's-behind trousers to Peanut Butter Jelly Time (thank goodness this moment is not lost but preserved for posterity on YouTube. If you squint a bit, it looks as though Edward Heath has abandoned himself to the wild embrace of Terpsichore. Which is almost funnier).

Perhaps it is time for the rest of them to loosen up a bit as well. What if Peter Mandelson, when Sarkozy accused him of being responsible for the “No” vote in the Irish referendum because he had upset Irish farmers, instead of appearing on the Today progamme to announce silkily that his shoulders were broad, had said what was really on his mind? “And yer Mum, frog features!” for example. You never know, it might have moved things on a bit.

On second thoughts, it wouldn't do. We need our statesmen and women to set standards for us to live up to. As it happens, I share Dr Rice's revulsion for the social kiss. I like to be a bit discriminating in my embraces, reserving them for the people I love. Faced with the prospect of a social kiss from a complete stranger or, even worse, someone I know for certain doesn't like me at all, my instincts tend towards the farouche - to run away or spit in his eye, or something. In these situations I have always regarded the US Secretary of State, whose beauty, poise and astounding mastery of figure-skating and piano playing I fervently admire, as something of a role model. In trying circumstances, the first thing I ask myself is, what would Condi do? Only now it looks as though I'll have to find myself an alternative Miss Manners.

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