It is surely the final straw for Tony Blair. Already regarded by many as George Bush’s poodle, and as being dangerously distant from both party and country, he has now been outed as the possessor of those most undesirable of male accoutrements — moobs.
We are not used to expecting politicians to be lithe Adonises (perhaps the only party leader of recent years who could survive such bodily scrutiny was that former special-forces officer Paddy Ashdown), but we are increasingly keen to spot their physical imperfections. The youthful David Cameron has been criticised for an early middle-aged spread; William Hague was unkindly compared to a foetus; and if no one chides Gordon Brown over his bulk, it is only because the thought of the Chancellor disporting himself in nothing but his swimming trunks is best not entertained.
For Blair, the once-virile leader of our “young country” (as he called it), the downfall is distressing to observe. Full of thatch and trim of waist, in 1998 the PM came 44th in Cosmopolitan’s list of the UK’s 100 sexiest men. Alas, his moobs are evidence that he has lost both his sex appeal and his dignity.
Metrosexual man may revel in being androgynous, in being both masculine and a moisturiser, but moobs suggest the less flattering side of the coin — that their owner is verging on the hermaphroditic. And not just that. The moob-wearer becomes a figure of fun. One thinks of Michael Winner and Peter Stringfellow, on whose chests gravity has taken its toll but to whom it has supplied no gravitas in recompense.
Whatever their age, it seems that men today are being held to the same levels of physical perfection that only women were formerly expected to attain. Is there a nasal hair straying from a nostril? Then depilate. Is the manly skin at all rough or dry? Then exfoliate.
Advertisement
This is a new and harsh regime for 21st-century man. His predecessor, late-second-millennium man, had learned to groom himself — a little dab of Brylcreem or gel depending on the decade, followed by a judicious splash of aftershave — and this, combined with light exercise on the tennis court, was considered quite sufficient.
Did Burt Reynolds or Sean Connery have to worry about the precise shape of their pectorals? (They were helped, of course, by the vogue for hairy chests, an armour which can conceal many a blemish. Sadly, the PM is not so blessed in that department. Anyway, one imagines that unrestrained foliage à la Burt would have fallen foul of Miss Carole Caplin’s strictures.) Today men are inspected from every angle, criticised mercilessly for the merest ounce of excess fat and laid piteously low if found to be in possession of moobs.
Thus it is Tony Blair’s fate to have begun his premiership high of hope, with a deal in an Islington brasserie — and to end it tragicomically, with suggestions that he may now be in need of a brassiere.