After 25 years of hosting celebrity parties, I know these are the horrible mistakes people make all the time, ex-Vogue editor ALEXANDRA SHULMAN reveals

After 25 years of throwing parties at Vogue, I think I’m an expert on party etiquette – for both guests and hosts. While Vogue parties aren’t exactly the same as having friends over for a drink and a sausage on a stick, the issues are surprisingly similar, and bad manners are bad manners wherever they are.

Here are a few of my top do’s and don’ts for anyone throwing or attending a festive party.

Hosts

• Dress codes are atrocious – why make people wear something that they don’t necessarily look good in and that they will probably never wear again. PS: Fancy dress is completely unacceptable.
• Never place couples next to each other at the table, unless you are in America, where for some reason this is common. It amazes me how often people do this for weddings. Who wants to sit next to the person they are sharing the car ride with?
• Let people bring a plus-one – but maybe not their mother. Leonardo DiCaprio once took his mother to a Bafta dinner, but not everyone is Leonardo DiCaprio.
• Don’t apologize to your guests for anything – let them assume that everything is exactly as it should be.
• Remember, young people don’t drink wine – they clumsily like cocktails.
• Don’t worry about the food because no one remembers what they ate when they were having a good time. Although Daylesford Organic founder Carole Bamford’s ‘caviar and carols’ party is an exception, because even the biggest guests are like pigs at a trough when it comes to caviar.

Guests

• Never accept an invitation to an event you know you want to skip when the day breaks. Nigella Lawson calls this the ‘distant elephant’, the obligation that lurks in the mind and grows larger as the day approaches.
• Don’t ask who else is invited.
• Never involve the host in your transportation problems.
• Don’t bring flowers. No host wants to scrounge around for a vase.
• Never play with the seating plan that the host has worked out for hours. Recently I sat next to a man who shouldn’t be in that seat. He had switched seats because he didn’t want to sit across from someone he had had an affair with. Understandable to a degree, but before I learned the circumstances I thought the person who was supposed to be next to me had moved to avoid me.
• Make a French exit and just slip away. Hosts don’t need to know you’re leaving, and if they’ve just relaxed, they won’t want to say goodbye.
• Don’t sit in a corner with your best friend.

Forget furoshiki – just fix the potholes!

Our council, Brent, in North London, has provided residents with an AZ guide to Christmas recycling.

This is the same lot that once sent someone over to advise me that if I thought I had too much food for the recycling truck, I should consider using old cheese to make a quiche instead of throwing it away . In that light, I was intrigued by their latest advice.

Bows and ribbons apparently cannot be recycled and should be saved for next year; metal cake tins and candy wrappers should be clenched into a ball and thrown in the trash; and we should think about adopting the Japanese practice of furoshiki: the use of cloth instead of paper for wrapping gifts.

Personally, I would prefer the city to do something about the sorry state of the sidewalks.

Numbers are not Clive’s specialist subject

Bad excuse of the week: Clive Myrie, the BBC newsreader and Mastermind presenter, who is clearly an intelligent man, claims that he mixed up the paperwork as the reason he didn’t declare more than £150,000 in freelance speaking fees. With that income, on top of the £310,000 a year he gets from license payers, he can certainly afford an accountant.

Would Gregg say I’m middle-aged?

When Gregg Wallace claimed that only “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age” objected to his unsavory behavior, I wondered if I qualified.

Middle class, yes, but am I middle-aged? What’s the cutoff point for getting older instead of middle-aged?

And did he think that Gen Z, which we all know is the most censorious generation ever, would give him a free pass?

Brilliant Eddie, the baby-faced killer

If you look at age, not only police officers look younger, but also murderers.

Eddie Redmayne, brilliant as the killer in The Day Of The Jackal, looks like a fresh-faced student compared to how I remembered Edward Fox in the same role. Eddie is 42, but Fox was only 36. But at the time, when I was a teenager, Fox seemed almost old.

The show goes on – without smart Anna

Judging from the reviews, it sounds like The Devil Wears Prada musical has fallen into the usual trap that anything based on the fashion industry falls into. They are almost always a bad caricature and never convey the glamor of the real thing.

In support of Elton John, who wrote the score, Anna Wintour wore Prada on the first night, but sensibly slipped out before watching the show. No one knows better than them that it’s all about the optics.

Will the last customer turn off the lights?

Oxford Street used to be the highlight of London’s Christmas lights. But now the big money is on Bond Street, where the spectacular decorations outside shops like Dior, Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Brunello Cucinelli bring traffic to a standstill as crowds take selfies.

But does anyone go in to shop? Well, not so much.