I was chatting to a senior oil executive the other day (as one does), and I asked how that vast multinational corporation ran its top speech-writing function.

"Oh,we have the usual – a team of young speechwriters, which is what you need these days."

Really? Why do you need young speech-writers?

What books have they read? What hard decisions have they ever had to take? What pain have they suffered? Where have they been? What encounters with senior foreign people have they had – do they know just how to pitch things right?

What experience do they bring to the job, other than the doubtful one of being ‘young’?

Today I heard about Peter Mandelson in India from someone who had watched him in action. His visit came soon after the dreadful performance of David Miliband who insulted his much older Indian counterpart by being over-matey with him during their private meeting.

Peter Mandelson by contrast (I was told) insulted on a much bigger and public scale.

He addressed a large gathering of business people at an event also attended by several senior Indian politicians. In his random Nu Labour way, he made a flaccid speech about globalisation, including passages saying just how well India was doing as an ’emerging economy’. He then left the event to move on to ‘another engagement’.

I think that this must be the speech concerned:

For a couple of years up until about the middle of last year there was a debate going on in the financial services sector and in the financial media over the extent to which the emerging economies – including India, of course – had ‘decoupled’ from the developed world.

Have India, China and the other emerging economies achieved enough momentum economically to fundamentally break the link between their economic destiny and ours in the EU and the US?

… I welcome the fact that the Indian government remains so committed to liberalization of its financial, legal and accountancy sectors, which will be an important contributor to attracting the foreign investment it wants for its large infrastructure projects.

The Indian knowledge economy has ambitions to cater for a global market. The expansion of Indian manufacturing, which the government rightly sees as central to defining India’s future place in global value chains, will be built on the further opening up of the Indian market to industrial imports.

This sort of thing is in fact very hard to draft well. See especially the absurd and unwise phrase "I welcome …"

How does one say anything much about someone else’s country at such an event without somehow seeming to be assuming to oneself the role of loftily pronouncing on the good marks and not so good marks, like a cargo cult schoolteacher?

Here the ignorant and jejune speechwriter obviously failed to get it right, a high-profile blunder all the more embarrassing for the UK as it came immediately after D Miliband’s fiasco.

After P Mandelson had departed, a senior Indian speaker addressed the throng and had them in stitches laughing at Mandelson’s patronising style and hollow substance:

"We look at the UK and see it as a sub-merging economy!"

Maybe there should be a new rule.

No politician should have a speech-writer younger than s/he is.

Just think of all those mountains of money and time wasted on so-called diversity training, when simple reminders about Good Manners would have been far more effective.

Let’s see if David Cameron can get things back on track.