In truth, we'd be lost without all those little white lies

"Isn't he gorgeous!" murmured my friend, planting a kiss on her newborn nephew's cheek. "Gorgeous," I echoed, looking down at what appeared to be the product of a sexual liaison between Vladimir Putin and Homer Simpson. ("He's still a little jaundiced."

"He is? You can hardly tell.") We'd been on our way to the park when she'd suggested we drop in on her sister-in-law. The visit was mercifully brief. "Yikes," whistled my friend, no sooner were we out the door. "That is one ugly baby." "You thought so?" I mumbled. "He looked rather sweet to me. And newborns are never really that pretty."

I wonder how many white lies we tell a day. A lot, if you're Joanna Lumley, who in an interview at the weekend admitted to being "a big believer in the white lie". "I've told friends curtains they've made are beautiful, that a gift someone bought me is divine, and after an awful meal, 'Well, that hit the spot. It was lovely'," said the nation's plummy-voiced conscience.

"Why would I want to go around upsetting people?" If you're British, that's one thing you don't do. It's a logical extension of our famous toleration. As a nation, we're often perceived as being purveyors of trivial, diplomatic or well-intentioned untruths. Call it manners, tradition, cowardice or plain laziness.

"Most of the time I can't be bothered to tell the truth," one male friend of mine confessed under interrogation. "It's just easier to lie, isn't it?" Those little fibs make up the fabric of our society. I was six when I overheard my first white lie. We'd gone to see an old family friend who was dying, and my mother had remarked on how well she looked. When, in the car on the way home, I asked why she'd said that, she refused to admit the lie.

As a parent, how do you explain that there is such a thing as a good lie? You don't. But it filters down naturally because, without white lies, family life would be impossible. All discussions relating to mothers-in-law, ex-wives/new girlfriends and ugly progeny would have to be avoided altogether; birthdays, anniversaries and Christmases would be spent sitting around, catatonic under layers and layers of suppressed emotions, everyone gasping with relief when the obligatory infant/grandparent came out with a breathtakingly frank observation.

("Looks rather like Goebbels," my husband's formidable 94-year-old grandmother muttered when we first placed our three-month-old daughter on her knee.) Politicians aren't given the same latitude, for reasons I'm not sure I understand. They are, after all, our representatives in every sense. That's why they lie through their teeth, often for the best of reasons. Do we want them to address their opponent as "that piece of low-life scum on the benches opposite who speaks only too clearly for the morons who elected him to his hideous constituency", or as "The Rt Honourable Member for Duxbury-in-the-Marshes"?

Do we want them to say we are the most over-borrowed nation in the Western world primarily because we are among the most financially illiterate, gullible and incontinent? Politicians are two-legged, two-faced animals like the rest of us, subject to the same laws of necessary hypocrisy. As with the family, so with society - and the brotherhood of nations, so-called.

Our statesmen can't swan around abroad addressing the natives in the manner of the Duke of Edinburgh, any more than we can go around (my husband's granny excepted) telling family members that their babies look like Goebbels on an off day, that the Dukan diet clearly isn't working, and that your mother thinks your brother's new girlfriend is a money-hungry opportunist with vulgar taste in footwear. We have enough problems to be getting on with as it is, without everyone blurting out the truth and bringing the house down.