Joan Smith: Dinner at Amiel's leaves a bad taste

It's one of those tricky social situations: how to react when one of your guests makes a distasteful remark. Barbara Amiel, wife of the Daily Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black, recently found herself in this situation at her London home.

Amiel had several options: confront the offending guest, ask him to leave or cross him out of her address book, thus consigning him to the social wasteland occupied by people who are not regularly invited to the Amiel/Black salon. I don't know how she reacted at the time but Amiel subsequently chose a fourth option, available only to people with connections in the media. She used the episode in a column in Monday's Telegraph, providing everything – the fact that the speaker was the ambassador of a European country, the timing of the event, and the exact words he is supposed to have used – except his name.

In no time at all, the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, had been outed, as Amiel must have known he would be. For some commentators, it marked the return of "salon anti-Semitism", which does at least make a change from "salon terrorists", the charge hurled by another Telegraph writer at those of us who oppose the war in Afghanistan. (Right-wing columnists are in the paradoxical position of continually sneering about salons, while belonging to a dying élite that still aspires to preside over one.) Bernard spent the rest of the week trying to play down the episode, denying that he had used the words attributed to him – "that shitty little country Israel" – and making the unconvincing claim that the misunderstanding had come about because of his uncertain grasp of English.

He also let it be known that he was appalled that private remarks had been made public in this way. Given that his host and hostess were a newspaper owner and a columnist respectively, it might be argued that he should have been more cautious, instead of naively assuming that he was among friends. Yet politicians, ambassadors and special advisers often mix with journalists and there is an unspoken assumption that no one is going to rush off and publish a verbatim report of the conversation. The only time I had dinner with Tony Blair, I was astonished to get a phone call from the hostess a couple of days later. "Tony wanted you to know that everything he said was off the record," she said anxiously, prompting gales of laughter. Blair, who was then an ambitious Opposition front-bencher, had said nothing of note in the course of a very dull evening.

The warning was in any case unnecessary, for both sides in this game understand that you don't exploit someone's hospitality by getting other guests into trouble. The exception to this rule, in my view, is when someone behaves with gratuitous rudeness or in a way that amounts to bullying. When Sir Robin Day lost his temper with me at a dinner party, going very red in the face and shouting "balls" and "bollocks" across the table, I had no hesitation in writing about it. I did the same when Amitai Etzioni, an adviser to President Clinton, responded to a perfectly civil question by shouting abuse at me. On both occasions, I also told them exactly what I thought at the time.

But it doesn't seem to me that Bernard's behaviour falls into this category. Amiel has expressed some pretty rebarbative views herself in the past, including sympathy for General Pinochet. If she was really so offended by the ambassador's remarks, why didn't she identify him in the first place instead of leaving clues for other people? Even more to the point, her assumption that Bernard's remark was anti-Semitic, and she was therefore entitled to make it public, is pretty dubious. Amiel is Jewish and it seems unlikely that Bernard would have accepted her invitation if he is as prejudiced as he has subsequently been portrayed. It should not be necessary to point out that criticising Israel is not automatically evidence of anti-Semitism, any more than criticising Saudi Arabia, as I frequently do, makes me anti-Arab. Bernard may have used earthier language than we are accustomed to hear reported in newspapers, but so do most politicians and journalists, myself included, when speaking in private. If there is a lesson to be learned from this episode, which has been blown up out of all proportion, it is that some invitations should be treated with caution. It is not the French ambassador's politics that have been called into question on this occasion, but his taste in friends.

I don't share Joan Collins's enthusiasm for marriage. The actress has just announced her nuptials for the fifth time, the bridegroom on this occasion being a Peruvian-born theatre manager. "I feel more myself with Percy Gibson than I ever have with anyone," she announced with alarming candour last week. Where I do sympathise with Collins, however, is on the question of age. The Times put the story on its front page, where it declared in the headline and again in the first paragraph that the bridegroom is 32 years her junior. Other reports referred to him as her toy boy. (Men who marry much younger women, by contrast, are said to have trophy wives, a compliment to their power and status.)

Got it, everyone? At the age of 68, when she should be drawing her old age pension and booking coach trips to Clacton, Collins has pulled a young bloke. A young Peruvian bloke, and we all know about Latin lovers. Madonna is only in her forties, yet her marriage to Guy Ritchie last year prompted a great deal of comment, even though he is only 10 years her junior. A website discussion of "sexy older women" last week included not just Collins but Geena Davis (44), Michelle Pfeiffer (43) and Sharon Stone (41). If they fall into that category, presumably any woman in her 30s is middle-aged. No wonder the demand for cosmetic surgery is rising.

The Queen (75) is positively ancient by these standards. She has just had her portrait painted by Lucian Freud and the result was unveiled on Friday. Both subject and artist are instantly recognisable, and the full-face pose is a break from the royal tradition of posed sitters with self-conscious smiles. But why did she choose to wear that crown? Despite its obvious weight, it perches on her head as incongruously as one of those paper hats that fall out of Christmas crackers. Perhaps she feels undressed without it, but it suggests awareness that her presence alone no longer carries authority. Unlike Diana, Princess of Wales, the Queen has never gone in for glamour. But this is the portrait of a monarch who has lost her old mystique, and what's more she knows it.

With many more people going in for serial monogamy these days, the greeting card industry has had to change. There are cards addressed to "dad and his wife" and to "mother and her partner", reflecting the rather more complex relationships we all have to negotiate at Christmas. Even so, I was surprised to discover a section marked "pets" in a shop the other day. You can now buy cards to send to your furry companions, and some lunatic has even produced cards to be sent by pets ("Season's greetings from the cat"). Is there no limit to our anthropomorphism? Merry Christmas to readers of this column, including literate hamsters and gerbils.