What is the greatest act of sacrilege you can commit against the English religion of middle-class respectability? Mixing up the recycling with the other rubbish? Allowing the top of your string vest to poke above the line of your shirt when going tieless? Offering your guests Marks & Spencer’s pre-mixed Bucks Fizz before lunch? Giving yourself and your nursery age children matching buzz cuts? Asking for a lager top in a gastropub? Confessing you find Fi Glover ghastly and would prefer to listen to Capital Gold given half a chance . . .
I suspect there is one sin against bourgeois tastefulness even greater than any of the above. And I am guilty of it.
I didn’t like Wolf Hall.
Yes, I know, Hilary Mantel is rather wonderful; unassuming, dedicated to her art, living modestly in Knaphill, Surrey, away from the metropolitan literary circuit and single-handedly taking the genre cul-de-sac of historical fiction and making it relevant to our age. I’m all too well aware of how audaciously she upends our assumptions about “saint” Thomas More and lets us see how this historical martyr was, in fact, like all too many contemporary “martyrs”, a religious bigot happy to inflict pain and misery on others in the name of his austere and reactionary orthodoxy. And I know also that she so immersed herself in the mood and politics of the time that she lives and breathes Tudor intrigue.
But the book itself drags. I found its characterisation was vague and clumsy. It was difficult to follow the action at crucial moments. It lacked narrative momentum. And I just lost interest after about 150 pages. I know I am opening myself up to criticism much sharper than if I’d confessed to drowning kittens, raiding church poor boxes to fund my crack habit, or even shooting with the children of Libyan presidents. But, since channelling the spirit of 16th-century Reformation heroes is the way to assert cultural relevance these days, let me just quote Martin Luther and say: “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
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I think I may be the only person living who willingly ticks every aspirational wannabe-member of the chattering-classes box (adores Jim Naughtie, loves In Our Time, tries to read all the articles in the London Review of Books, thinks Gary Gibbon on Channel 4 News the most sophisticated political broadcaster, laments the demise of The South Bank Show, wants to be reincarnated as Alan Bennett, etc, etc) and who still doesn’t like Wolf Hall. Can there be any other act that would place me so firmly outside respectable middle-class opinion as this? Well, I suppose I could always say I think Tony Blair was right to invade Iraq . . .
Shooting from the hip
Sometimes one reads a news story that encapsulates about 53 different things that are wrong with our world. And a perfect example was a Times report this weekend that Essex police were warning parents not to give their children toy guns lest they be mistaken for tooled-up drugs lords and blown away by the force’s firearms squad.
In one story we saw reflected: the distancing of the police from the people; the State interfering in family life; another erosion of childhood innocence; a reminder of how the maintenance of good order has become more and more a matter of threats and force, not civility and setting an example; a coarsening of the relationship between authority and citizens; the creep of health and safety culture; a ducking of full responsibility for their actions from those who should be protecting us; and an insidious, humourless, decaffeinated Swissification of the public square.
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A marked man
It was a touch chillier than I’d anticipated on Friday, so I popped into the Army & Navy store in Camberley looking for a jumper. I soon found one that was perfect for my basic needs (lambswool, V-neck, navy, identical in almost every way to the type of jumper I started wearing at school at the age of five and have worn ever since). Except for one factor.
It had a little badge on it. A designer label. In this case a rather handsome eagle, signalling to all and sundry this was one of Messrs Lyle and Scott’s quality knitted garments.
And so I didn’t buy it. Because I have an aversion, amounting I suppose almost to an obsessive-compulsive disorder, against wearing labels. Or badges. Or insignia of any kind.
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I don’t like prancing horses on polo shirts, eagles on jumpers, crests on cufflinks, shields on ties, the swooping swirls of Evisu on the bottom of my jeans or the classic typeface of Hackett anywhere on my chest.
And yet they’re everywhere. Even though Beau Brummell pointed out generations ago that the whole point of male dress was not to draw attention to itself, the modern masculine wardrobe is a riot of signs, labels, logos and statements.
In place of this semiotic clanjamfrie, I just want from menswear what I suspect most Brits just want from menswear — garments that allow me to blend, calmly unnoticed, into the background. Which, given my views on the saintly Hilary Mantel, and indeed the war criminal Blair, is probably only prudent.
Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath