Dressing down Brown

Here’s another thought about the difference between Blair and Brown in their relations with the business world (see ‘The coming Blair nostalgia’ in this week’s online edition). On Wednesday night, for the eleventh year in a row, Gordon Brown ‘snubbed’ the City by refusing to conform to the evening dress code for the Mansion House dinner. To wear a black bow tie instead of long, dull, striped one, his spokesmen annually point out, would be to break his socialist principles and pander to elitism. But really his psychoanalyst might add it’s an expression of the self-righteous egotism and tortured self-consciousness that make him such an uncomfortable public figure whatever he’s wearing. Blair has never made a fuss about that sort of thing, and has even been seen in white tie and tails. Evening dress is not elitist in a true sense (who doesn’t dress up when asked to do so by any private party invitation, if only as a matter of politeness?) but merely makes a crowd look uniformly elegant and it costs no more than a decent suit.