SO what's the thread linking Tony Blair's wish for a more polite society, that dreadful woman off The X Factor and Channel 4's even more appalling Celebrity Big Brother? Well, I hope to establish a connection, so here goes.

Many national newspaper columnists have been attacking the Prime Minster over his respect agenda. This is strange in a way because such readily combustible commentators usually like nothing better than a spot of yobbish behaviour to confirm their worst suspicious about life.

So you might have expected such righteous spouters to back the Prime Minster. My own feelings are a little mixed and so, in a typical spot of Libran dithering, here is an attempt to work them out in my very own righteous spout.

Let's start with some points against Tony Blair's respect agenda. The very name is irritating, and makes me want to say something very disrespectful every time I hear it. What a prissy, annoying and interfering thing this respect agenda sounds to be.

The stomach settles uneasily when politicians go on about morals and the like. Tony's respect agenda echoes John Major's "back to basics" initiative, an unbending credo he dreamt up while forgetting to tell us he had been having it away with Edwina Currie before moving into Number Ten.

And how clever it is of politicians to urge us to respect each other more when they are themselves such masters of courtesy, without a boo, hiss or juvenile putdown between them.

It's only a passing thought, but Tony Blair has started to talk about his respect agenda at the very moment when he elicits less and less respect from the general public.

Lack of respect is also very hard to measure. How exactly are we supposed to gauge it? Most people will simply summon up a golden age of politeness in which no harsh word or deed ever occurred. Yet such a morally pristine era would be hard, if not impossible, to pin down.

Also, it is easy to worry that Tony Blair exaggerates the lack of respect - much, say, as he over-states the awfulness of comprehensive schools - because it suits his own agenda. If he goes on about it enough, we might just start to believe him.

So what's in favour of the respect agenda? To the terminally liberal minded, which is pretty much where I pitch my tent, not a lot. Yet there is one important point here: those whose lives are most blighted by lack of respect are the poor and the disadvantaged - and that is who Tony Blair, for all his faults, is trying to help.

Anyone seeking evidence of a general lack of respect should look beyond rudeness, yobbish behaviour and drunkenness into the wider society outside Asbo-land.

What sort of society is it, for example, in which Sharon Osbourne's life story is the best-selling hardback autobiography since records began? I just don't get this woman at all and would hesitate to read two whole pages about her, never mind a book. Her rudeness and camped up bitchiness just grates for me, although I know that other people are amused or captivated by her.

And another bookish thing, why would 334,881 apparently sane people pay good money for a book called Being Jordan, about the life of a surgically reassembled glamour model?

It's a mystery.

Some lack of respect can be seen as a positive, suggesting that we no longer live in a deferential, cap-doffing society in which we all know our place.

Other examples show another side to all this. The latest Celebrity Big Brother, for example, is just horrible. What a nasty, preening and vicious programme this is. I nipped in for a look, and nipped away again smartly.

A certain gruesome irony lies this way, considering this week's theme. An MP for the so-called Respect Party has a feline encounter with a fading actress, in which he pretends to be a cat, lapping milk from an imaginary bowl while having his greying "hair/fur" tickled.

No one will ever be able to take George Galloway seriously again, which is probably just as well.

Updated: 09:56 Thursday, January 19, 2006