Make sure your underwear fits and is unobtrusive, consider whether your eyebrows are a distraction to others and, at all costs, avoid looking cheap.

This is the grooming advice given to new staff at Leeds Metropolitan University as part of a guide to etiquette.

The rules were set out during “manners training”, which included how to walk wearing a hat, how to select the correct cutlery during dinner and how to make polite small talk.

In the chapter on developing a “personal brand”, the graduate trainees were told to avoid wearing “clashing colours, crumpled or stained clothes” and to make an effort not to appear “frumpy, tarty, [or] lazy”, Times Higher Education reports.

“It really is up to you to send out the signals that you are intelligent, efficient, interesting and an asset to the university,” the guide tells them.

To that end, staff who attend or host university functions are told to be careful not to veer on to subjects that may cause offence during dinner discussion.

“Dinner is meant to be enjoyed, not to be a forum for debate,” and sex, religion and politics should not be on the menu for discussion, according to the 22 pages of rules.

Patricia Lee, the wife of the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Simon Lee, compiled the guide and gave a workshop to staff on how to conduct themselves at functions and how to behave at table. Decorum during dinner should be maintained so as not to cause “insult to your hostess”, the guide advises, adding that “wine at dinner is to complement your food, not to help you along the way to drunkenness”.

Refrain from clinking glasses during a toast, steer clear of the condiments before you taste your food, and never, ever lick your knife, it says. “If your napkin drops to the floor, it is acceptable for you to pick it up unless the house has a butler or servants near the table,” it goes on.

Staff are also directed on the finer points of conversation and the art of adapting your exchange to fit the situation, be it business, social or romantic. Such flexibility, the rules tell staff, will help university contacts and new bosses to feel comfortable around you and enable you to fit in. A model discourse is set out with suggestions for suitable opening questions such as: “What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?”

Anna Coulson, a graduate trainee in the Vice-Chancellor’s office, said that the guide had been very useful as she made her way through the social minefield of etiquette at the university.

But one academic, who asked not to be named and was not so keen to mind his manners, said that the guide was “a broth of self-important snobbery that most of us thought had been laughed out of existence in the 1960s”.

Dos and don’ts

— As any black-tie diner should know, it is poor form to pass a decanter of port to the right, but it is also not the done thing to ask for it directly. Instead ask “Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?” If the person asked answers “no”, then say: “He’s an awfully nice fellow, but he never remembers to pass the port.”

— The theologian Erasmus wrote in 1530 that farting at dinner was no bad thing, as long as one could “close the fert under colour of a cough” and avoid giving the game away by rocking from buttock to buttock

— When asking for a pay rise, Debrett’s says, ask for more than you’d like and do not threaten to leave, in case they take you up on it

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