Is there anyone in the running for the Tory leadership I can enjoy, purely from a style point of view?
Sheila, by email
Thank you, Sheila, for emphasising that all discussion of the Tories in this column will be purely from the perspective of personal style. I’ll leave it up to my colleagues on the politics desk to consider the waddyacallits, um, you know, the thingummybobs. Oh, yes, the policies. I don’t bother with such fripperies. I focus on what really matters: personal style.
We could talk about Dominic “I am totally not a misogynist, but feminism is bigotry” Raab, and his hilarious photoshoot with the obligatory supportive wifely presence. Three weeks on and I’m still thinking about how someone – him? Supportive wife? – put two slices of toast on what looks like three plates on the kitchen counter next to him, ensuring we, the lucky public, would still see it over the casually opened cookbook. Nothing more relatable than toast and a cookbook, folks!
There is an interesting divide on my social media between women who have a crush on Raab (lunatics) and those who have one on Rory Stewart (ummm?). I don’t have one on either of them. (I’m holding out for a young Lucian Freud or young Mickey Rourke, neither of whom, sadly, are running for the Tory leadership.) But I can appreciate that Stewart is fast becoming the star of this leadership contest, albeit one that is going to burn out – so maybe more like a glorious doomed supernova.
Stewart is such an oddball figure that it is strange it has taken this country so long to develop a collective fascination with him. He gives impassioned speeches in the house about hedgehogs. He has been accused of being a spy (which yes, m’lud, he strongly denies). He has the permanently rumpled and ridiculous air of someone who was born very much in the wrong century, or at least wishes he was. And yet he appears to have cannily changed tack for this leadership contest to work the most media-friendly trend of all, which is cheerful nerdiness.
In the US, Pete Buttigieg, whom I increasingly regard fondly as a male Leslie Knope, is very much flying the flag for the cheerful nerd contingent, and now Britain apparently has its version in Stewart. So far, Stewart’s self-consciously hotchpotch campaign seems to consist of him going round various places, filming himself there, and then tweeting plaintively to see if anyone wants to have a chat with him. “Now – if anyone wants to talk – in Kew Gardens – for the next hour,” was his undeniably nerdy (and slightly tragic) Tuesday message. If that doesn’t sound nerdy enough, it is painfully obvious he is not doing the filming (which he admits), but merely holding his arm outstretched so it looks as if he is making a selfie video. Why? Who knows? But this is very much on-brand for Stewart, who perhaps is a little less adorably straightforward than some people think.
The thing about Stewart, is, unlike Buttigieg, I don’t think he sees himself as nerdy. I have been rereading Ian Parker’s hilarious 2010 New Yorker profile of Stewart this week, which is rich in observations such as: “His name seems nude without a ‘Sir’ in front of it. When he stands still, he seems to be posing for a sculptor.” Stewart long saw himself as the second coming of TE Lawrence (“an idol of his”) who, inconveniently, was born in an all-too modern era. (Incidentally, there is something very revealing about this country in that Stewart is considered something of an outsider. As his mother described Stewart’s background to the New Yorker: “Dragon [school], Eton, the Army, Balliol, diplomatic service. It’s Edwardian.”)
As a child, he named his toy horse Bucephalus “for the horse that Alexander the Great tamed as a youth”. Still as a child, he had a fondness for reciting Hamlet. As an adult he refers to his parents as “Mummy and Daddy”. Stewart isn’t TE Lawrence, he’s Max Fischer from Rushmore without the class issues. Or the Cat Stevens soundtrack.
He is a British eccentric with preternatural intelligence that Boris Johnson can only dream of. So, for that reason alone, I am disposed to like him. And after all, no bad ever came from this country becoming obsessed with someone who seems to be a bit of a character. Right?
