The last time I saw Dylan Jones he was pleading with a posh blonde to write about anal sex. “Go on,” he said, “I’ll give you a pound a word.”

Jones, I hasten to add, is not a pervert. He is the 46-year-old editor of GQ magazine and the most accomplished networker (although some might put it a bit more rudely than that) of his generation. Now Jones has just launched himself as a style guru with his new book, Mr Jones Rules: How to be a Modern Man.

It’s actually a good book; full of useful information for the perplexed modern male in search of how to do everything from discovering the elusive G-spot to locating the hot spots of New York and London. Curiously, it does not mention the secrets of Jones’s networking success, which is odd, for he is the Sultan of Schmooze.

These days we get lots of media stars providing style manuals for the aspirational — so I am thinking of writing a style/etiquette book for media players called: How Not to be a Prat and Still Influence People.

Why is such a work needed? Because the once dull murmur of back-slapping and mutual promotion in the media has become a deafening roar and Jones is one of the main culprits.

Hasn’t London media always been this way? Well, yes and no. I remember in the 1980s there was the popular myth that the media were run by a small, coked-out cabal centred around London’s Groucho club. I was a member of it and I can tell you that it wasn’t true. I had plenty of friends in high places — newspaper editors, book publishers, television producers — and yes, I could get these people to take my telephone calls — but not my ideas. Columns and commissions were not handed out on a plate. For every back scratched a dozen more were stabbed.

Since his appointment as GQ editor seven years ago, Jones has worked flat out — and with great success — to create his own personalised network of supportive editors, journalists, celebrities, fashion designers, models and even potential prime ministers. To join this exclusive club you must take its one and only pledge: you publish me / I publish you / we promote each other.

Here are my rules for How Not to be a Prat and Still Influence People.

• Rule One: Give your editor friends lunch, not a column
  Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, gets Jones to write — from time to time — the Spectator Diary. These pieces enable Jones to promote his two favourite products: GQ and Jones. (Actually, the two are inseparable.) In return, d’Ancona is rewarded by Jones with a column — he is the new GQ political correspondent. (Jones had an equally cosy and reciprocal relationship with former Spectator editor Boris Johnson who wrote about cars for him.) Here is a modern case of publish and not be damned, but publish and be published.

  Who says there is no such thing as a free lunch? Ask Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent and another Jones mate, who writes a restaurant column for GQ that allows free nosh with a celebrity of his fancy. Guess who has a column in The Independent: Jones.

  These days former editors (Johnson, the Daily Mirror’s Piers Morgan) never fade away — they get columns in GQ.

• Rule Three: Never play follow the party leader
  Jones gave David Cameron, the Tory leader, the ultimate Jones free goodie bag: the cover of June’s GQ. In return for this interview the grateful Jones proclaimed himself a Cameron supporter — having previously declared himself to be a David Davis man.

  Cameron now owes Jones a favour and promptly proclaims himself a supporter of Jones. At September’s GQ men of the year awards the audience was shown a video clip of Cameron saying: “One of the highlights of the year was being interviewed by your editor Dylan in the back of a (Toyota) Prius.”

  Jones has even cultivated royalty. In 2005 he took part in a charity called Fashion Rocks on behalf of the Prince’s Trust. Can it be long before the Prince of Wales is named as GQ’s organic gardening columnist?

• Rule Five: Please don’t feed the celebrities
  The most remarkable thing about Jones’s network is that once a year a whole gaggle of celebrities — this year it was Jonathan Ross, Billie Piper, Jamie Oliver, Naomi Campbell — turn up to lend their name and glamour to promote GQ and its editor. They will do it for nothing more than a free meal, a glass of champagne and a chance to have their egos stroked by other celebrities.

  The GQ awards ceremony is the most nauseating display of celebrity self-regard and back-slapping that you could ever witness.

  And the awards are not always given out on merit but on which celebrity will promise to come to the event. This year Ross admitted that Jones had called him and offered him GQ’s radio personality of the year award if he would turn up to collect it.

  Of course Ross was happy to oblige.

• Rule Seven and the most important one of all: Never be annoyed by what you read in the papers
  As Jones is fond of saying: “Always keep a big smile and a short memory.” Or in other words: there is no such thing as bad publicity.