MPS without ties risk being even less appealing
It simply is not true to say, as many are claiming, that it would have been “unthinkable” for MPS not to wear ties in the chamber of the House of Commons until perky John Bercow gave them permission last week.
When I sat in the press gallery in the early 1980s, a Labour MP called Harry Cohen was usually tieless. His career came to an ignominious end in 2010 after it emerged that he had claimed £104,701 as a second-home allowance for what was, in fact, his first home. Another character who was frequently open-necked in those days was a young revolutionary with a beard. He is now the leader of the Labour Party.
Such men were tolerated. Matters became stricter after the introduction of television cameras to the House in 1989. Until then, MPS had often slept openly in the Chamber, written letters and put their feet up on the benches in front of them. Many of them used to reel in drunk for the “wind-up” before 10pm. Such actions – all perfectly acceptable to a House which understands its own rules – did not look so good when watched by millions. There was a tendency to smarten up for the cameras. Ties were part of this.
If men now stop wearing ties in Parliament their reputation will decline further still, for the simple reason that the British male needs every possible artificial assistance to impede his natural tendency to behave like a slob. What drivel it is to say that people should wear “whatever they want”. The primary purpose of clothes worn outside the home is to consider the feelings of others, not one’s own convenience. It is not even strictly necessary to wear trousers, but that is not the point. If twerpy Mr Bercow encourages MPS to appear half-naked, we should insist that the televising of Parliament end forthwith, at least until after the 9 o’clock watershed.
Besides, a tie is a sign of ambition. When Jeremy Corbyn at last began to wear one, teamed with quite a smart suit, for television appearances during the election, a chill gripped my heart. I realised for the first time that he actually wanted to win.
The subject of trousers reminds me of an old friend of my father called Professor Reiff. He was a very brave member of the German resistance to Hitler, and looked after two Jewish children in his house in Berlin during the war.
He also fought in the Wehrmacht. In 1944, he was captured in Italy. By this time, the British had too many German prisoners to guard them properly, so they removed their trousers to discourage them from running away.
Professor Reiff realised that his unguarded POW camp was on the edge of a town on the Amalfi coast where he had used to holiday before the war. So he walked there, trouserless, and found his favourite restaurant. The head waiter recognised him and, courteously not looking at his bottom half, said: “Your usual table, Professor Reiff?” He ate a decent meal and then, with Teutonic correctness, returned to his captors.
An outburst of profanity has greeted the policy by Samuel Smith’s, the brewers, to ban swearing from their licensed outlets. “If you banned everyone from swearing in a pub, you wouldn’t have a business,” is one of the few printable reactions.
I wonder if this is true. Many – including me – said that the smoking ban would kill the pub. It certainly did hit it hard, but I doubt many would now like the ban to be lifted. Public places are a lot nicer without the smell of stale cigarettes and the inhalation of other people’s fresh tobacco.
Something similar might apply to swearing. At present most of us accept it – and indulge in it – as an inevitable part of pub life. But pubs are changing. They have moved fast from being all-male drinking holes to all-day eating and drinking places frequented by families. Few parents like it when people swear in front of their children.
Until quite recently, it was commonplace to hear people using derogatory racial words in public. Now it is shocking. Swearing could go the same way. After all, it is a form of speech that often contains menace and tends to be more derogatory of women than men. It always surprises me that leftish newspapers like the Guardian pride themselves on printing swearwords in full when they disapprove so much of other symptoms of male aggression.
I suspect that pubs with a “noswearing” policy will start to prosper. Those who cherished the freedom to swear could be confined to special four-letter bars like the old “snug” – or go and swear outside with the smokers.
Canada celebrated being 150 years old this year, but I fear the world barely noticed. Even Britain, chiefly responsible for the creation of this enormous, multi-ethnic, democratic and prosperous country, is not excited. There are too many jokes about Canada being boring.
History makes a cult of change brought about by violence. Everyone has heard of the French and Russian revolutions. Even the United States was forged, and reforged, by war. But it could well be that history will come to see change by such means as barbarous.
Canada, created in its modern sense by peacefully bringing together four different colonies under “Confederation” in 1867, will come to be the global model of post-colonial political civilisation. Boring is good.