LEADERS’ LEGS TWO VIEWS ON BREXIT ROW
A Daily Mail front page that declared ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’ next to a photograph of Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Prime Minister Theresa May almost broke the internet this week. But was it offensive, sexist rubbish, or just a
It’s a tough world in the public eye and, yes, when it comes to appearance, it’s usually tougher for women. That’s life and I don’t think we should get too het up about it, but I admit I envy men when I’m dithering about what to wear for a television appearance, or a speaking engagement.
All a man has to do is wear a suit and carry a tie in his pocket in case the event turns out to be more formal than he’d expected.
But, like any other woman, I have choices.
Fashion doesn’t interest me, so my role model is much closer to being Angela Merkel than Theresa May, or Nicola Sturgeon.
Had I the misfortune to be Prime Minister, the tabloids would long ago have given up commenting on my unruly hair, or my penchant for black trousers and bright jackets.
But Mrs May and Mrs Sturgeon are from the Margaret Thatcher school of presentation and, like her, take a great interest in clothes and use them for reasons of power-play. That makes them fair game. It baffles me how commenting on how two women who take enormous care with their wardrobe and have each been photographed by Vogue should be off-limits for comments on the amount of leg they both like to flash.
Clothes matter. Remember when Sinn Fein ceased dressing like geography teachers and acquired what the journalist Fionnan Sheahan described as “an arsenal of sharp suits”?
In 2005, a few days after the IRA stated that its “armed struggle was over” and the year after the IRA robbed £26.4m from the Northern Bank, Mr Sheahan wrote: “Following on from the republican movement’s high-profile withdrawal from a well-known financial institution in Belfast late last year, the Sinn Fein front ranks are now dressing up like bank managers.”
“Forget about Tiocfaidh Ar La,” he concluded, “nowadays it’s about Tiocfaidh Armani.”
Knowing that Sinn Fein elected representatives were allowed to keep only the average industrial wage, people marvelled that the women were able to afford their smart jackets and statement jewellery.
(Google explains: “Statement pieces of jewellery allow women to step out of the mundane and define themselves as unique, confident, passionate, and interesting people.”)
Mrs Thatcher (left) dressed to impress whether she was off to dominate the House of Commons, charm the US president, drive a tank, or wow the Soviet Union.
A couple of years ago, it emerged that, some time previously, her children had informally offered a gift of some of her clothes to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s lead- ing museum of art and design. It had been “politely declined”, explained a spokesperson contemptuously, as “the museum is responsible for chronicling fashionable dress and its collecting policy tends to focus on acquiring examples of outstanding aesthetic or technical quality.”
“Was her taste really any worse than Kylie Minogue’s, whose gold hot pants the museum put on display in 2007?” wondered an American journalist.
The V&A later performed a U-turn, explaining that “Baroness Thatcher was an internationally recognised political figure, who used her wardrobe as a strategic tool to project power and inspire confidence.”
But, of course, what was going on here was fashionable people’s
❝ It was, as one might have expected, the virtue-signalling Left who led the denunciations
snobbery and loathing of Thatcher and the Right.
Jonathan Miller, the director and writer, spoke of her “odious suburban gentility”; Baroness Warner, an Oxford philosopher, considered that “her neat, wellgroomed clothes and hair” embodied “the worst of the lower middle-class.”
A Guardian journalist fretted that “she has become the patron saint of ‘power dressing’, an example of how to dress with strategic and political intent. But, by celebrating her style, we are in some sense condoning her politics”.
The furore over the Daily Mail’s front-page picture of the attractive legs so generously displayed by both Mrs May and Mrs Sturgeon and the article by Sarah Vine light-heartedly analysing their posture was ludicrous.
Like many other papers, they mock prominent men over their paunches, thinning hair, and, in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, shabbiness.
A comedian on the BBC once described Ms Vine’s husband, Michael Gove, as having a face like “a foetus in a jar”.
It was, as one might have expected, the virtue-signalling Left who led the denunciations: Alastair Campbell (of dodgy-dossier fame) said the Mail was “utter scum” and should be “ripped up”.
Owen Jones, the Guardian columnist, explains that this “stench” from “an open sewer” was evidence that, post-Brexit, the sexist bigots were on the rampage.
Sarah Vine hit back. “If it’s real sexism you want — proper, vicious prejudice of the most misogynistic kind — allow me ... to offer you (this),” she wrote, and then quoted from an article published in the Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper: “As a student, David Cameron is rumoured to have put his penis into a dead pig. To outdo him as an adult, in an act even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist.”
Mrs May didn’t complain about the coverage. Mrs Sturgeon did.
To which I repeat President Harry Truman’s wise words many years ago: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”