Dressing the part
Petronella Wyatt
Having fallen down the stairs last week, I am back in inaction. The following days were spent doped-up on some painkiller they once gave me when I had shingles.
Goodness knows what stuff they put in these tablets, but Thomas De Quincey could not have asked for a more satisfactory narcotic. When my friend Alistair McAlpine was in hospital two years ago they gave him a drug which induced a series of hallucinations, the most common of which being that everyone in the hospital was involved in a conspiracy to assasinate him. In my case, however, this was no hallucination. 'I kill it you,' said my mother in her impeccable English, 'before you kill it me.' Even the dog wouldn't speak to me. It regarded me with a rheumy and despairing eye, perhaps recalling the occasion when I was living in the Lanesborough Hotel and had entered the lift with the dog on the end of a lead, only to find that as the elevator shot up three floors the lead was there but the dog wasn't.
On occasions like this there is only one thing to do, drink dry martinis and watch black-and-white movies such as Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. Why? Because nothing cheers a sick and miserable person more than quantities of alcohol and the sight of other people being murdered.
Our very own Thin Man appeared in the newspapers during the following days. I refer, of course, to the Prime Minister. When Mr Blair emerged on the front pages with a naked girl on his cuff and then in a peacock-blue, long-sleeved T-shirt, all the pundits rushed to embrace that old cliche of 'putting style over substance'. One newspaper described his sartorial tastes as 'another example of the vanity of our preening premier... if his suits and his hair and his inner cuffs are dandyish, might the same not also be true of his philosophies (if they exist at all)?'
It may seem odd for this Spectator columnist to unshcath her sword on behalf of the Prime Minister, but blame it, if you please, on my having literally gone soft in the head. But, hey. Why is it that if a man dresses well, taking a shameless pride in his appearance, everyone assumes that there is nothing but straw stuffing in his head.
This attitude is disgraceful. It is one of pure sexism. Consider my most cerebral girlfriends, including the columnist Minette Marrin, Miriam Gross, the books editor of the Sunday Telegraph and Nancy Brinker, the new US Ambassador to Hungary. They might make the top ten of any of those Best Dressed lists, and who thinks the worst of them for it?
Why, then, should the well-dressed male suffer ignomy and jeers? True, some intellectuals have been less careful about their appearance than the average orang-utan — Dr Johnson, Rousseau. are two obvious names but there are more who have not.
Consider Byron, Peel, Melbourne, Pitt, Walpole, John Wilkes, Disraeli — the list is endless. As for the received wisdom that Churchill lacked physical vanity, this is bunkum. His favourite self-portrait is the photograph in which the war leader is dressed in a pinstripe that would put Mr Blair to shame, a snap brim trilby hat, and wielding a machine-gun. Nothing could have been more posed since Lady Hamilton's fabled 'attitudes'.
If a man cannot organise his clothes it is often an indication that he cannot organise much else — either his life or the country. Both Dr Johnson and Rousseau were psychological and personal disasters. Indeed, a lack of interest in one's appearance is the first sign of mental and physical deterioration. Why else the tale of the man stranded alone on a desert island who always dressed for dinner to maintain his selfrespect? We should be proud to have caught that rare bird, a politician who is concerned with his clothes. Far from implying that he must be little concerned with the country, the opposite may be true.
One should always be suspicious of the man who wanders about unshaven, in illfitting clothes with his tie falling about his belly. Worse still if he makes this a virtue, stating portentously that he so dresses to free his mind for higher things. Apart from this stance being ill-mannered — as, after all, one has to look at him — it is inordinately pretentious. A man who cannot be bothered to take care of his clothes will often extend this cavalier attitude to his care of others.
It is about time that serious men were freed from this tyranny of having to look colourless and dull. Serious women were released from it a decade ago. I, meanwhile, applaud Tony Blair for having the courage of his cuffs.
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