No ties, Mr Speaker? What next – MPs in Hawaiian shirts?

IT WAS not quite the end of civilisation – no, that low water mark came when Ascot allowed men to remove their jackets in the Royal Enclosure – but it came pretty close. Another lowering moment in our island story. was watching BBC Parliament (yes, I lead an exciting life) when it happened.

The Speaker rose, chest swelling like a pouter pigeon, to call upon an MP even though he was wearing a blue open-necked shirt, yellow lanyard draped around his neck. Then he took it upon himself to proclaim – rocking a plump, purple paisley neckpiece himself – that while male MPs should wear ‘business-like attire’ to the Commons, ties were no longer essential.

Order! ORDER! How very dare one little man suddenly decide to lower sartorial standards in the Palace of Westminster, the mother of parliaments, in the sacred chamber where the world watches Western democracy at its best at work?

The tie is the universally acknowledged signifier of male seriousness. It denotes respect. You wear ties to chapel at school, or to a funeral, to the office, and you must certainly wear them in the Commons, Mr Speaker! As he completed his announcement, a ghastly gallery of dressdown alternatives went through my head. Dennis Skinner in a Hawaiian shirt. David Davis in a pilot’s shirt with natty epaulettes. Philip Hammond in a safari suit. Ken Clarke in ‘city shorts’. Declaring ‘ties not essential’ opens the same dread Pandora’s Box of choice women confront daily. We have no rules for our ‘businesslike attire’ (even though some earnest US department stores have sections called ‘careerwear’).

So getting dressed for work each day is a bore and a chore, for the simple reason that we don’t have a smart everyday uniform we can put on without thinking that can ‘transition’ from office to social event in the evening. And lucky, lucky men do. It may be conventional, uncomfortable, and hot – but at least the suit and tie is easy.

Next: men look better in suit and tie. They just do. In fact, they can look devastatingly, heartbreakingly handsome, even if the tie is at half-mast and the top button undone. And they look terrible in sloppy, crumpled open-necked shirts, without wrinkled dewlaps tidied away under collars.

As Nicky Haslam, the nation’s leading tastemaker, explains, this is the wrong country to licence a sudden official extension of casual dress-down Friday styles.

‘British men are so lazy, they never get anything starched,’ he says. ‘They must think it’s somehow wrong to be smart.’

I agree, Nicky. But I am not allowing my despair at this development to take hold. I reckon that if John Bercow tells MPs to do something, they are more likely to do the opposite.

I expect his edict will lead to an upsurge in men turning up to debate and vote in full, formal Edwardian starched-collar rig.

But still, I do think that instead of telling MPs they’re allowed not to wear ties, he should have told them they were a red-line requirement.

I can only hope our legislators pay more attention to me than they do to the Speaker.