Londoners don't make good neighbour

It is rather sweet that the Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, only days after being robbed by a man he kindly allowed into his house to use his loo, has decided that what we now need is "a neighbourly society". In his keynote policy speech on law and order yesterday he signalled that the Tories no longer wish to just hang and flog but instead would like to develop "a cycle of responsibility" and hope that young renegades will then hang out at Neighbourhood Watch meetings and flog raffle tickets for charity. And much as we all welcome the Shadow Home Secretary's cheerful optimism about the criminal classes' ability to embrace fresh new conservative ideas, I fear he has not taken the London neighbour into his considerations.

A friendly urban neighbour is one who does not complain to the police about a car alarm going off in the small hours (everybody knows the car is not being stolen; it is just the radio that is being pinched). The bloke to have next door is the man who doesn't bang on the wall when you choose to play Pink Floyd's Greatest Hits at full volume at midnight and doesn't give you a knowing look when a tarty blonde in a miniskirt arrives when your wife is away for the weekend. A real London neighbour does not chat when you meet on the way to work in the morning, lean over the fence to compliment you on your azaleas or comment on your bottle of Jacob's Creek when you bump into each other at the corner shop.

The great neighbour is an anonymous, unknown figure who, at best, looks straight through you and at worst offers a watery smile and a mumbled good morning if you happen to meet in public.

When I lived in a ground-floor flat in Notting Hill - a flat so small that when friends rang they would hang up after one ring as the phone was only an arm's length away - I only once came into social contact with the neighbour who lived above me. Water was dripping through the ceiling and I went upstairs to complain. After banging on the door for some time a dishevelled, disorientated woman opened it. She was soaking wet, with a dressing gown wrapped roughly around her and blood dripping from her wrists. "I'm sorry," she said, "I must have left the bath running." And with that she slammed the door shut. A few days later we passed each other on the stoop. She was bandaged and looking wan and did not utter a single word to me.

There is a belief by tourists, perpetuated by London taxi drivers, that real Londoners not only talk in rhyming slang, sing "Knees Up Mother Brown", love their nans and eat jellied eels but are, in particular, friendly and neighbourly. However, one only has to take a fleeting glance at the soap opera EastEnders to see that the friendly neighbourhood cockney is an urban myth. To be neighbourly in EastEnders is to shoot the publican, firebomb the chip shop and beat up the adulterer. If you talk to anybody in "The Square" you need a tongue sharper than Graham Norton's and a skin thicker than Stephen Byers's.

The truth is that east Londoners, just like those from north, south and west London, all understand that, to survive in the crowded city, one needs to have the protection of space. And the way to achieve that space is by good manners and to avoid knowing the people to the immediate left, to the right, above and below.

My perfect neighbour was a New Yorker. We both lived in a 36-storey apartment block on 86th Street and Second Avenue. One night our separate cabs dropped us off at 3am. We were the only people awake in the building. We walked to the elevator together. We rode to the 30th floor, turned right, stumbled along the corridor and opened our neighbouring apartment doors at the same time. And both slammed them shut. At eight o'clock the next morning we met again in our work clothes, walked to the elevator, took it down to the ground floor and went our separate ways. At no time during either the late-night or early morning encounter did we acknowledge each other's presence.

Oliver Letwin hopes that the creation of a "neighbourly society" will mean making somewhere "safe for children to play in, towing away abandoned cars, removing rubbish, repairing playgrounds and pushing out drug dealers". But first he needs a policy to teach Londoners to get to know each other so that when we ask to use your loo, you can be sure we are not about to steal the family silver.