The etiquette of a black sheep’s wink

Alexander Chancellor says that George Bush was probably in two minds about dressing in white tie for the Queen: how to be polite without grovelling to the old colonial power Before last Monday’s state banquet for the Queen in Washington, it was being put about that President Bush didn’t want it to be a white-tie affair. ‘We sort of had to convince him a little bit,’ the First Lady, Laura Bush, said on ABC Television. And his supposed abhorrence of formality was implicitly confirmed by the White House social secretary, Amy Zantzinger, who, when asked about it, told the New York Times: ‘I think Mrs Bush is thrilled to have a white-tie dinner, and we’ll leave it at that.’ The White House’s idea was to suggest that the homespun, cowboy-booted, Godfearing Texan rancher had no time for the effete and elitist sartorial customs of the British; and the New York Times went along with this spin by representing the banquet as a ‘collision of cultures — Texas swagger meets British prim’.

But that is rubbish. The fact is that you are much more likely to find an American in a white tie than you are an Englishman. Whereas our next prime minister, Gordon Brown, has even refused to put on a white tie for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, George Bush is perfectly happy to wear one when the occasion demands it — as he did at the banquet given for him by the Queen in Buckingham Palace in 2003.

The Americans may have invented jeans and T-shirts, and have adopted sportswear as their national dress, but they have never stopped loving formal occasions. You can’t be a middle-class American without being regularly called on to wear a dinner jacket, and there are times in Washington DC when the streets seem to be thronged with young men in black ties making their way to some event or other.

In the United States, formality grows as you go south. The South’s most exclusive social event is the Swan Ball in Nashville, Tennessee, to which I was once invited, ten years ago. The price of attendance then was $500, the theme was ‘elegance’, and the dress was white tie and tails. President Bush claims to be a Southerner, and he must have attended a few events like that.

It is nevertheless true that white-tie dinners at the White House are rare. The banquet for the Queen was only the third for a visiting head of state since 1980. The others were for the Emperor of Japan in 1994 and for the King of Spain in 2000, both given by President Clinton.

But this doesn’t mean that the White House is resistant to the ultimate in formal dress; it’s just choosy about whom it dons it for. And, curiously, it seems only to do it either for itself on special days, like the Millennium Eve, or for visiting royalty.

When the Queen last visited Washington in 1991, the president was George W.’s father, George H.W. Bush, who also gave her a state banquet but not in white tie. Perhaps he felt that Britain hadn’t been loyal enough to deserve the honour, for Mrs Thatcher had actually chided him in public for going ‘wobbly’ over Iraq. By con trast, Tony Blair’s support for his son has been exemplary.

This was the Queen’s third encounter with George Junior. Her first was at lunch during her 1991 visit to Washington when the circumstances were bizarre. His mother, Barbara Bush, recounted in her memoirs that she had jokingly told the Queen during the lunch that she had put her ‘Texas son as far away from her as possible at the table and told him that he was not allowed to say a word to her’.

According to the former First Lady’s account, the Queen then turned to George W. and asked him why this was. Was he ‘the black sheep in the family’? she wondered. Dubya replied that he guessed that he was, and then asked the Queen who was the black sheep in her family.

He could, perhaps, have been more tactful; since, on the eve of her ‘annus horribilis’, the Queen then had a small flock of contenders for the role. But this was an example of Bush Junior’s would-be lovable little-boy cheek, a trait that he demonstrated again this week when, after getting the date of the Queen’s 1976 bicentennial visit to America wrong by 200 years, he winked at her and confided to the 7,000 people on the White House lawn that she had given him ‘a look that only a mother could give a child’.

There has never been much squeamishness in America about the white tie as such. Ronald Reagan positively loved it and insisted it be worn at his inaugural balls in 1981 (he wore morning dress for the inauguration itself). And remember Fred Astaire’s ringing endorsement of the outfit in his song from the 1935 film Top Hat:

I just got an invitation through the mails, ‘Your presence requested this evening, it’s formal — A top hat, a white tie, and tails.’ Nothing now could take the wind out of my sails Because I’m invited to step out this evening With top hat and white tie and tails.

But when they are dealing with the British, Americans become confused in their attitude to formal dress. It doesn’t matter how informal we Britons have actually become, or how much more reluctant we are than they to tog ourselves out like penguins. We are irrevocably stamped on the American mind as stiff, snooty and elitist. And for them to wear white tie in our presence associates them with these contemptible characteristics of ours.

When it comes to the monarchy, Americans are even more confused. ‘Let’s face it, all Americans are a bit intrigued by royalty,’ said Laura Bush’s spokeswoman, Sally McDonough, this week. And this understatement was born out by their strenuous efforts to impress their royal visitors with their mastery of pomp and pageantry.

But at the same time many Americans feel uncomfortable with the thought that they might be showing deference to the institution that oppressed their forebears and shed their blood in the revolutionary war. They don’t like the idea that they have shaken off the British yoke only to grovel before George III’s descendant.

So while this week Americans wanted to give a warm and lavish welcome to the head of state of their closest ally, some were in a quandary as to how much bowing and curtseying and dressing up to do. Perhaps President George W. Bush was among them.

But, as far as I know, only one American went so far as to refuse an invitation to the royal banquet. He was Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada who, according to his spokesman, ‘isn’t much of a white-tail-at-dinner kind of a guy and would just as soon spend a nice quiet dinner with his wife’.