Boris Johnson’s scruffiness screams entitlement
Contrast that, though, with those photos of him laying a wreath at the Polish war memorial on Friday. “He looks like an abandoned sofa,” was how somebody put it on Twitter. The collar skew-whiff, the suit ill-fitting and crumpled, the hair tufting everywhere, as from the last coconut on the shy. Who, you wondered, had let him leave Downing Street like this, looking as though he was about to be wheeled around a 2000s sketch-show by David Walliams?
“God, that’s disrespectful,” I thought to myself, as I sat there preparing to write a column for the most famous newspaper in the world while wearing a cardigan that never goes outside and my pyjama bottoms. “Such entitlement.”
Remembrance appearances, particularly in Britain, represent an understated fashion show in which nobody mentions it when you get it right (the Duchess of Cambridge on Sunday; perfect) but all hell can kick off when you don’t. The most famous example of this is of course Michael Foot causing a phenomenal stir with what this newspaper described as a “green donkey jacket” in 1981. Almost as famously, it later emerged that it was actually quite an expensive coat, which he wrongly thought would look smart; which you might think renders the whole fuss unfair, although I’d suggest it renders it the most Michael Foot thing ever.
The exact same thing happened to Jeremy Corbyn 37 years later, when he laid his wreath (for our side this time, no complaints there) in an M & S cagoule. Given how implausible it seems that any Labour leader could have forgotten about what happened to Foot (let alone that Corbyn could have), I always assumed there was messaging here. There are still, though, diehard Corbynites who recall that episode as viciously unfair, grouping it with that time when Newsnight was falsely and fabulously accused of having used Photoshop to cast Corbyn, then-Labour leader, as a communist by embiggening the height of his Breton-ish cap. Either way, the next year he wore smart and sombre black, like everybody else.
Johnson, likewise, knows what he is doing. Yes, he may often look as if he has been dragged reluctantly into work, perhaps interrupting his second job of being tied to a pole in a field with a turnip for a head. But actually, and obviously, there has been no more blatantly image-conscious PM in my lifetime. When he goes jogging outside a party conference in preposterous clothes (a dress shirt; Bermuda shorts), he is best understood as a man too vain to be seen jogging in the same clothes as everybody else.
It is no conspiracy theory to see every last bit of his appearance as artifice. Interviewed about his hair by Politico this year, Johnson’s biographer Sonia Purnell pointed out that he wore it smart in his thirties, even while going “to some lengths to make himself and his car and everything quite scruffy”.
What does it mean, when the powerful or privileged style themselves thus? It’s a question I ponder with some trepidation, because I do own a mirror. My friend Sathnam Sanghera – a man who knows what starch is and isn’t afraid to use it, I suspect even in places you can’t see – is fond of telling me that you have to be posh to dress as I do, because it’s a giveaway that you don’t feel socially precarious.
I’m never sure this is wholly right, because I was scruffy even as a small child, much to my parents’ embarrassment, and I doubt the raging entitlement had quite kicked in yet. But it is certainly true that in my 20 years writing for The Times I have drifted from wearing a suit every day to only wearing a collared shirt when I absolutely have to. And on that trajectory, if I’m lucky enough to stay here until I retire, then I can’t rule out getting off the Tube looking like Albus Dumbledore.
Recall, also, that it was the public schoolboys of David Cameron’s Conservatives who made a point of taking off their ties, and the grammar school boys such as David Davis who made a point of keeping them on. Johnson, though, has something subtly different going on. Much like his estranged sidekick and fellow bag lady Dominic Cummings, he doesn’t so much shun the convention as observe it with performative disrespect. The shirt is on, but out. The shoes have been buried in soil, then dug up again. It is as if they wish to distance themselves from their tribe, without losing the advantages of still definitely being seen to be in it.
Obviously, there’s a powerplay here. It’s like the host of the glamorous party who himself answers the door in no shoes. It’s Adrien Brody’s billionaire in Succession, daring the Roys to even mention that he looks like he lives in a bin. It’s Jacob Rees-Mogg, himself immaculate, who displays ownership of the Commons by lying down in it. It also, obviously, carries a whiff of the usual rules being for people less brilliant than yourself. “For the apparel,” as Polonius put it in Hamlet, “oft proclaims the man.”
There he was, though, at the Cenotaph, looking perfectly respectable and neat. Sure, maybe he just ended up neat by mistake, because he was in a rush and didn’t have time to scruff himself up again. Or maybe it’s far more significant. Because it’s one thing to look a mess when you’re on top of the world. It’s quite different, though, to look a mess when you actually are one.
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When politicians look a fright at the Cenotaph, it’s traditional for the press to beat them up for it. Allow me, then, to begin this column by bucking convention. Because didn’t Boris Johnson look smart? Well done him. I could feel myself channelling Billy Zane meeting Leonardo DiCaprio at the bottom of that staircase in Titanic. “Why! It’s amazing! You could almost pass for a gentleman!”