Mea Culpa: Sir Surname and assorted lords, ladies and dames

We briefly referred to the top civil servant in the foreign office as “Sir McDonald” last week. Russell Clarke wrote to say that it reminded him of teaching in France during the Falklands conflict when the local Nice-Matin newspaper “kept talking about Sir Pym and Sir Nott”.

British title conventions are arbitrary, but The Independent’s style is that knights are referred to by their first name at second mention. So Sir Simon McDonald when he first appears in the story, and Sir Simon after that.

The same goes for dames. Dame Rosie Winterton followed by Dame Rosie. Peers are Lord Mandelson throughout, although I think Peter Mandelson at first mention and then Lord Mandelson makes it easier for the reader. For no good reason we say Baroness Smith to start with and Lady Smith thereafter, although again I prefer Angela Smith, usually with a job description after her name, “Labour leader in the House of Lords”, followed by Lady Smith.

In fact, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t use titles at all. First name and surname at first mention, and surname thereafter, is all we need. But it’s not up to me, so we should stick to our style book.

Finer point: “Detail” is one of those words we often throw into our journalism to make it seem more, er, detailed. For example, last week we reported: “British epidemiologist Professor Ben Cowling, who works at the University of Hong Kong and has studied the original outbreak in detail, says the virus ‘certainly’ originated in a bat.” We wouldn’t be quoting him if he had studied it by flicking through some pages on Wikipedia, would we?

In the middle: Professor Cowling appeared in an article headlined: “Live animal markets carry on amid calls for crackdown”. Further to my grumble about our excessive use of “amid” last week, this is a case crying out for a “despite” instead.

Big numbers: One of my rules of thumb is that we should avoid percentages higher than 100, unless we are quoting a footballer who is “giving 110 per cent”. Last week we had a headline saying: “Travel insurance premium rockets by 550% as providers brace for huge payouts”.

Most readers would gather that this was a big jump, but I think they would be more likely to grasp the scale if we called it a sixfold increase.