There's something very English about not being too earnest, something we think wrong with taking things too seriously. Kate Fox in her book 'Watching the English' makes much of two main pieces of the English character: nothing, on the surface at least, is ever taken too seriously. But that is very much a surface matter. We joke about things, we use irony, sarcasm, light jokes, more than possibly any other culture on the planet. We also tend to laugh at people who, on the surface at least, take things too seriously: the American (whether preacher or salesman, often not too different actually) proselytizing for this thing or another is something of a figure of fun.

However, for all this surface lightness, we do take things just as seriously as everyone else: in fact, we take things like values and integrity a great deal more seriously than many others. In many other cultures it is the process, the rules, that are important. To us it appears that it's the outcome. There are serious legal scholars who argue that the invention of the jury was precisely to allow the essence of the English tradition into the law: Hey, that's just not fair!

There are those who would in fact argue that fairness, the perception of it, is in fact the basis of the English (or if you prefer, the British) character.

It is also true that we seem to think that character (sometimes called 'bottom') is the defining characteristic. If someone has this then they can be trusted and if they don't they can't.

But actually the most important thing is not that one is earnest, but that one has integrity: remember the line about 'the faster he talked of his character, the faster we counted the teaspoons?'.

The story we think best encapsulates this is a possibly apocryphal one from the City. The trainee has been allowed to do his first deal over the phone and excitedly reported to his boss that he'd just got a very good price out of the customer. The boss insisted that he phone back immediately and do the deal again with the correct, lower price: 'if we are to insist that our word is our bond then it will be our honest word'.

Of course every company says that they value such integrity, as the consultants at Talisman will tell you, it's part of the standard boilerplate. But the odd thing is that in the wider society around us in the UK, we really do value it at a deep cultural level: we just don't seem to appreciate people being too earnest about it.