In 1990, when I had been at the FT only a shortish time, the then editor resigned. I liked him; he had been kind to me and I was sorry to see him go. But I was also very junior and had a proper horror of brown-nosing. Should I write him a letter, I wondered? Or would that be unseemly?
In the end I didn’t write one, but only because I had spent so long dithering I had missed my moment. For a journalist to be several weeks late responding to news was not going to look good.
Since then the world has speeded up, so any response happens not in weeks but in minutes. It has also gone social: we no longer address our words of farewell to the person concerned but to everyone with an internet connection. And most remarkable of all, somewhere along the way our aversion to brown-nosing has got lost. It is not something to be done shamefully in secret, but proudly and with as much fanfare as possible.