Not long ago, I was refused admission to an event, on the curious basis of my not wearing a tie.
No big story there, I grant you. The man in charge was very polite, and quickly furnished me with a spare from the box of ties that they kept for people like me. The one I chose, the least ghastly I could find, made me look like the cross between a bookmaker and a nervous intern interviewee. Being a career twat, I wore it for long enough to get me in, and then took it off to make whatever childish point was on my mind at the time. And to feel comfortable at a nice party.
On reflection, it strikes me how, in 2019, anyone has the cheek to enforce a dress code that wider society abandoned decades ago. Because, for an employee to have stood at the bottom of that staircase and prevented my going up it, some membership standards committee must have previously lurked in the deep brown leather chairs of a dark and institutionally grim room and agreed to carry this rule on for at least another year, Canute-like in their determination to ignore the incoming tide.
If you listen very carefully, you can just hear the faint echo of their conversation.
‘It’s all about standards. It’s about cherishing them, protecting them, enforcing them. We are the last line of defence preventing the ingress of the Barbarians at the gate. If we surrender on neckwear, what next? It’s only a matter of time before we are seeing narcotics in the atrium and open sexual congress in the ante-rooms.’
It’s easy to mock, but there is a serious point somewhere down there, which is the one about the maintenance of real standards, meaning the ones that should count, having rather more to do with how you make people feel, rather than how one tiny bit of them looks. Sometimes, it’s called ‘respect’.
I am an unlikely subversive. As a white, middle-class, middle-aged, moderate, middle-of-the-road, home-counties, Anglo-Saxon, public school educated, ex-military, company director/non-fiction author, I probably have more silver spoons in my mouth than that club has in its kitchen. In the lottery of life, whatever prospective Tory leaders like to say about the relative ‘modesty’ of their upbringings, I won many prizes before I was even born. Anyone who knows where their next meal is coming from is in the same place. But being an unlikely subversive doesn’t mean that I’m a contrived one, and with each year that I get closer to the great anteroom in the sky, I hold these thoughts more strongly and sincerely. I never lacked for food on the table which, ironically, has given me the luxury of shining an annoying spotlight back up at some of the workings of my own tribe. I’m still part of that tribe, by the way, but I find that from year to year I like less and less the little tricks it employs to keep others out.
That tie is just such a trick. Populists from Islington to Bar-Room Nigel are wrong on just about everything they open their mouths on, but they are smart enough to have detected where to direct the grievances of a fractious nation, and those little tricks are what they consistently focus on. Individually, they may seem to amount to nothing; aggregated, they start to resemble a chain link fence with a board on it saying “keep out!’. After all, it’s easy to occupy the middle ground when it exists within a gated community. It is what has created the febrile atmosphere within which, in a couple of weeks’ time, we will have an internationally reviled man as our Prime Minister. One of the tribe.
‘People will forget what you said,’ the infinitely wise Maya Angelou once pointed out. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.’
For good reasons and bad, right now they feel shafted.
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