My idea of the stereotypical English Gentleman as a program manager is someone who uses nice language and still makes it perfectly clear, after you have thought about it a little, that he's telling you to fuck off idiot.
Not someone who's not able to communicate.
We Americans are dense and don't always pick up on undertones of disappointment. Half of the program answered his questions as if they weren't loaded. It was painful to listen to after a year.
Here's an article which discusses some difficulty that British communication could be causing in diplomacy right now http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37799805
For six months I knew that we had a hardware driver problem on the target hardware that was causing the drive to be accessed at PATA speeds (3 MB/s max throughput stuck out from my time spent configuring Linux).
Finally, finally I convinced him to let me sit in on a call to the vendor (VxWorks) and in fifteen minutes we identified the problem and a feasible workaround. Old VxWorks, new bridge controller(?) backward compatible with one they DID support.
All because he couldn't say what needed to be said.
We got a nice 35% jump in the app after the next firmware upgrade.