Well, Theresa May met half of the Foreign Office’s dress code for women in Saudi Arabia when she arrived there yesterday. Her coat was loose, you couldn’t take exception to her trousers, but it was the hair that was the great thing. She was bare-headed, just like Angela Merkel was when she turned up in the Kingdom. The vicar’s daughter and the pastor’s daughter have both made a stand, in a country where women normally have the equivalent of a bin liner to wear when it comes to fashion.
This kind of thing matters. For a woman head of government to dress for a visit to the Kingdom pretty well just as she would have done anywhere goes right against the normal approach for important women going to Saudi. The protocol is to cover up nicely, just as the royals tend to do when they visit the Pope – even though most Catholic women haven’t worn a mantilla (more’s the pity) for about forty years.
On a visit to a mosque, it would obviously be another story, but trade talks don’t necessitate head cover. It’s a singular instance of how not doing something, without saying a word about it, can make your position more clear than any amount of cant about values, though Mrs M is presumably doing quite a lot of that too. If only she’d made it a weekend visit, and demanded to visit a Christian place of worship on Sunday, as she’d do at home. Now that would have been a genuinely useful move.
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