Jeeves was right! There is no time at which a tie does not matter

ALEX YOUNGER gave a speech at his old university in St Andrews – only his second since, four years ago, he took up probably the shadiest and most sensitive job in public life.

As head of MI6, he is in charge of Britain’s spies and third-in-command – ‘C’ – in our combined intelligence services. He is privy to very many terrible secrets, keeps close tabs on our national enemies, has probably seen some deep-state dossier on Jeremy Corbyn, may or may not have an exploding pen and seemed the other day neither shaken nor stirred.

But it was neither his terrifying hinterland nor his soft, professorial mien that most shocked: it was Younger’s attire. Not the dark, well-tailored suit and white formal shirt – that cannot have come cheap – but the lack of a tie.

This hideous style was popularised around a decade ago by David Cameron and other self-consciously hip politicians keen to get ‘dahn wiv dah kidz’. And it is a deliberate, almost offensive statement.

No one expects you to wear a tie with a T-shirt, for instance, or a polo-neck jumper. But deliberately to wear a suit with a tieless and open collar is to suggest conscious insouciance, as if you have just come back from something very important and now choose to hang loose around people who actually aren’t.

I don’t find it endearing. I find it arrogant. I would not dream of visiting my old school, giving a talk, appearing on TV, calling in at the office or going to church without dressing in reasonable formality. That is not vainglory or because I am a tragic fuddy-duddy, it is about regard for the occasion and respect for your audience.

If I am to give a minister an hour of uninterrupted attention, I expect him to wear a clerical collar or at least a neatly knotted tie. If a hospital consultant is about to brief me on a fraught operation, I would much rather the man about to guddle around my guts does not present himself in jeans.

THE pupils at my alma mater, Jordanhill College, have to wear ties. Were I to saunter along in jogging bottoms and a shaggy Dennis the Menace jumper, I would be insulting them and the school. And many lines of work – banking, for instance – are still most particular about dress.

It is, then, infuriating to go to church – these days an overwhelmingly middle-class activity – to find most men in casual attire of a sort they would not dare wear at the office, and worship of the Most High, apparently, marked down as a leisure activity.

It is not our way in the islands – where most of us dress for sermon with betied, besuited austerity – and the Irish take pride in turning out very smartly: a sea of black at funerals, and with prizes given out for the Best Dressed Lady at such horsey occasions as the Galway Races.

But, broadly, there has been a huge culture shift over the past half-century – as can be attested by glancing at YouTube footage of the massed London crowds at Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral. Almost everyone, high and low, is stiffly dressed on that bleak 1965 day; the great majority of men in ties and very, very few bareheaded women.

There have been, of course, trends and fashions. Until the Second World War, most men in very responsible jobs – headmasters, bankers, politicians – wore frock coats and winged collars. What we now regard as a proper business suit was, for that generation, something to wear on a Saturday.

Bow ties were widely sported into the Fifties, especially by doctors; now – save for formal evening dress – they are seen as eccentric and bohemian.

Most of us now wear colourful and patterned ties: it is startling to look back on the Kennedy White House and note that he and his lieutenants almost always wore narrow black ones. (Though no one was more responsible than JFK for putting hats out of fashion.)

At court, of course, the niceties are still observed. Among the unwritten rules for men working around the Queen is that jackets must be worn at all times – and buttoned if you are standing up.

That you must not wear a three-piece suit – waistcoats are for servants, not the Household – that she loathes facial hair (Prince Charles was once roasted when he turned up at the State Opening of Parliament in an alarming moustache) and despises clip-on bow ties. It is said Her Majesty can spot one at 100 feet.

We all once knew myriad little rules of polite society – for instance, that brown shoes are strictly for tweeds and the country; that you must precede a woman downstairs and follow her up them, and that your hat must be doffed whenever you enter a place of worship or someone’s home.

But now, of course, the barbarians are through the gates and we cannot even do ‘black tie’ properly these days.

Attend such a classy affair and it’s odds-on there will be women in short skirts or (worse) trousers; men in wing-collared shirts (a major solecism), colourful bow ties or, à la David Beckham, long black ties. The central point has been largely lost: that men should be in identical monochrome so that the ladies may most shine.

OF course, a degree of change is organic and inevitable. It was once de rigueur for women to wear long dresses at a wedding, but the Royal Family have not done so since Princess Margaret’s unfortunate match in 1960, and no Prime Minister since Alec Douglas-Home has donned frock coat and tall hat for their weekly audience with the Queen.

But even basic skills seem to be vanishing. I know men who cannot knot a tie, who probably think a half-Windsor is a cocktail and a four-in-hand has something to do with carriage racing. More and more gentlemen cannot properly polish shoes, few now seem to own a formal overcoat and many actually wear gloves (a cissiness loathed by the Kennedys).

But the demise of the tie is profoundly unsettling. It is no longer obligatory even in the House of Commons or many offices where ‘dress down Fridays’ are bafflingly usual. Some self-consciously hip corporations – Google, Amazon and Ikea – have actually banned them.

Indeed, there seems to be an unsettling new culture in such lines of work that, the more important you are, the more casually you may dress.

‘What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?’ Bertie Wooster once yipped. ‘There is no time, sir,’ replied his valet, ‘at which ties do not matter.’

He was right. The tie is liminal. It marks the boundary between work and leisure, between the public and the private sphere, between the juvenile and the adult.

The tie heralds that you are trying, that you respect those around you and take your duties seriously. BBC Scotland’s new The Nine news show will be wilfully ‘open collar’. Yet the great announcers of vintage radio – Alvar Lidell, Robin Holmes, Wilfred Pickles – always wore a tie, even for an audience that could not see them.

Alex Younger’s halfway house look is sad and stale, irritating everyone and pleasing no one. It is not a lot to expect a knot.