But my definitive test is how someone treats the people who serve them, those over whom, if so inclined, they can exercise cruel and arbitrary power. I once listened to a teenager boast, while her mother giggled indulgently, that she had tormented their Austrian au pair until she’d left. That one remark told me all I needed to know about that family. Men who are churlish to waiters, women who berate their cleaners, mothers who brag that they’ve run through 14 nannies in seven years: can’t middle-class professionals learn how to behave with all these newly acquired staff?

And when it comes to picking on the little people, no one does it like a film star. Russell Crowe, who won an Oscar for playing the noble and forbearing Maximus in Gladiator, was this week arrested for lobbing a broken telephone in the face of a concierge at the Mercer Hotel in New York. Crowe said he lost his temper because he was experiencing “abject loneliness” while missing his wife and young son back in Australia. Poor Maximus saw his family only as the little wooden effigies he carried with him, but he never took it out on hapless receptionists.

But then it is hardly surprising that Crowe played the parent card, since these days it is used to justify any amount of public selfishness. Now he joins the supermodel Naomi Campbell, who battered her assistant because she was made to wait in Customs at a Canadian airport, and Cheryl Tweedy, the Girls Aloud singer, who assaulted a toilet attendant at a nightclub, among the famous who don’t appreciate that only the merest stroke of good fortune separates them from those they tread underfoot.

I can’t help comparing Naomi unfavourably with her libel court nemesis, Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror: while taking huge pleasure in taunting the famous (Madonna’s husband Guy Ritchie flounced off when Morgan reminds him that he used to be a barman at his mate’s pub) in his memoir The Insider, Piers pays hearty tribute to every chauffeur and PA he ever had while editor, acknowledging that it was their self-sacrifice which kept him sane.

Like the hair extensions that thicken their straggly locks, celebrities can easily pad their moral thinness with a worthy cause: pin a pink ribbon on their Oscar gown or stand beside Bono demanding an end to world poverty. But I want to know if they behave decently to the menial workers who keep their lives sparkly and drudge-free, those who Stephen Frears featured in his mind-opening movie Dirty Pretty Things. “We are the people you do not see,” says the film’s hero. “We drive your cabs, we clean your rooms and we suck your c****.”

Whenever I meet famous people or talk to those who have, I’m less curious about what the celebrities said than how they treat their minions. A colleague who had lunch with the Prime Minister told me that even deep in conversation about the euro he always made eye contact with the waiter each time he was served. Of course, it would be crass to judge someone entirely on their private good grace, to rate US presidents not by, say, their foreign policy but the fact that the Clintons were cold and haughty with their security detail while the Bushes are affectionate, informal and kind. But it still helps to know which swaggering public Maximus, when his tea is cold or his car not waiting, is a misanthropic moral Minimus.

Hue granted

IN ONE of my irregular and usually pointless attempts to be fashionable, I have obtained a bottle of Chanel’s London Bus Red nail varnish. Only 3,000 pots were made and now they go for £40 a pop on eBay. I don’t quite know why I wanted my toes to be the same hue as my 176 to Oxford Circus, but ever since I saw the colour featured in Vogue I knew it must be mine. Every time I inquired at the Chanel counter, there was always another woman ahead of me asking in vain for the same colour.

But thanks to the darling Times beauty editor my toes are now a limited edition. Just a pity that no one in South London has noticed, but at least this season they are supporting public transport initiatives.

Seduction deconstruction

WATCHING The Graduate last weekend, presciently programmed by the BBC given Anne Bancroft’s death, I was struck by how differently one views this film with age. When I saw it as a student, I identified with Benjamin hiding at the bottom of the swimming pool from parental expectation, puzzling through the etiquette of seduction. Later I craved Mrs Robinson’s sophistication, felt moved by her despair and loneliness while re-evaluating Benjamin as a prig and ultimately a heel. Now I just sigh to think that when Anne Bancroft played this olderwoman siren she was only 36.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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