the kiss

About halfway through Have I Got News for You on Friday night the comedian Russell Brand announced that he needed to go to the lavatory. Lavvy he called it. This seemed fair enough - not the calling it lavvy, but the going.

When you've got to, you've got to. But as he was crossing the studio floor he turned and added "Enoch Powell always needed to urinate whenever he made a speech. Perhaps that's what made him racist."

I sat bolt upright in my chair at home.

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That "fact" had come from me, I realised guiltily. And it wasn't so much a fact as a variation on a rumour of a fag end I had picked up years ago, probably in a pub. And now it is out there, broadcast to the nation, treated as public knowledge. Oh dear.

I should explain how it arose. I met Brand a few weeks ago and, among other things, we talked about adrenaline - "Dr Theatre" actors call it, that rush of nervous energy that gets them through a performance, even when they have a cold. I noted idly that Enoch Powell - I was pretty sure it was him - had once advised a young politician that if he need to go to the loo before making a speech he shouldn't, because needing to go helps concentrate the mind.

But when I heard Brand repeat this I suddenly doubted my sources, mainly because I had no recollection of who or what my sources were. I've tried to find a reference for it since. I've flicked through indices. I've Googled the words "Enoch Powell" and "speech" with "loo", "lavatory" and even - which would have made Powell shudder - "toilet". The search offered some eyebrow-raising results, but not the ones I was looking for.

Anyway all this, rather long-windedly, brings me to the subject of shaking hands. This weekend Gordon Brown is boycotting the summit of EU and African leaders in Portugal because he doesn't want to risk accidentally shaking hands with Robert Mugabe, as Jack Straw did three years ago at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Mr Straw claimed the room was "too dark" for him to see whose hand he was shaking "until it was too late". (The Radio 2 presenter Sarah Kennedy, who caused a storm when she said she couldn't see black pedestrians in the dark, has subsequently used this defence.) The point is, Straw got away with his diplomatic blunder because he is a Labour politician.

A Tory foreign secretary wouldn't have. Even though the Conservatives have spent years proving that theirs is not a racist party, the shadow cast by Enoch Powell is long. And now, on national television, Russell Brand has declared that not only was Powell a racist, but an incontinent racist - and it might even have been his incontinence which gave rise to his racism. And it's all my fault.

Mr Straw said something else in his defence that day three years ago. He shook hands with the Zimbabwean dictator because he "didn't want to appear rude". How very British of him. It is our curse as a nation that we are far too polite to reject a hand that is proffered.

And this makes me wonder whether it is time to dispense with the handshake altogether. It's such a silly ritual. Outdated too, having originated as a gesture to show that the hand did not hold a knife (apart from in certain boroughs of south London that is not really necessary any more). What really annoys me is the tactical handshake, especially the "crusher", the one you're not expecting and which etiquette dictates you're not allowed to react to.

Others include the "clamper" (Bill Clinton will shake with the left while clamping his right on either your bicep, elbow or forearm, depending on your status); the "coverer" (John Major shakes with the left and covers with the right, giving the illusion of trust and intimacy) and the "puller" (Margaret Thatcher uses the shake to pull you out of her way, so that she can move on to the next person).

But what are the alternatives? The kiss is even worse than the handshake because there is rarely any agreement about how many times you should do it. Northerners kiss once, but often find themselves in the "corridor of uncertainty", that moment of hesitation when they weigh up whether to go for a second. Southerners adopt what they imagine is the more sophisticated French double kiss. But in France the number of kisses varies from region to region, with some planting as many as four.

I propose instead an all-purpose civilian version of the military salute. It would be like the one Richard Nixon used to give when boarding the presidential helicopter, an upward sweep that turns into a brisk wave. With this you could take your leave of a whole room in one go. And it would be more hygienic than the handshake, especially if the hand in question was attached to a comedian, or a politician.