In praise of straightforward men

When the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips married the rugby player Mike Tindall in 2011, the shallower among us wondered what she saw in him. We’re not wondering now. Watching the monstrous regiment of muppets and divas competing in the latest series of ITV's I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and seeing Tindall's equable nature – highlighted by the incompetent creative men who surround him, be they pop stars, actors or alleged comedians – makes it clear that the uncomplicated man is the smart woman’s choice.

Tindall seems tremendously capable – an overlooked virtue in a romantic partner, and one that comes to the fore during the hard times. He’s like a human Swiss Army knife, whereas the other men currently ensconced in the Australian jungle are so clueless that they make Matt Hancock look good. Before his retirement from rugby in 2014, ‘Magic Mike’ survived a lacerated liver and a punctured lung, and broke a leg once, ribs twice and his nose eight times – he’s obviously not going to have the abdabs about touching a spider. 

His air of calmness is so attractive that it seems neither here nor there that he looks quite like a potato. Whether telling stories about Princess Anne seeing his trousers split, pretending to be a catwalk model or jumping into a freezing brook in budgie-smugglers, he is adorable. He proves that true alpha men are never power mad; on being voted Camp Leader, he seemed mildly dismayed, but bore it with a good grace. He has quickly become the yardstick by which the others measure themselves. ‘We’ve all got limits ­– we’re not Mike,’ actress Sue comforted Loose Woman Charlene after she flunked a test. Putting on ‘war-paint’ and adopting a ‘war-chant’ a troop of poltroons went off to do a task; ‘Let’s channel Mike!’ they urged each other. Minutes later they were screaming because some frogs looked at them funny.

Whenever you see photographs of the Tindalls together, they appear to be having a laugh; this is a mate-marriage, not the most glamorous but definitely the most enduring kind. When it comes to royals picking a marital partner, we are used to seeing the responsible choice (the immaculate Kate), the romantic choice (the devoted Camilla) and the reckless choice (the ghastly Meghan). A life of dogs, curry and the Princess Royal babysitting when you go down the pub seems so desirable compared with the Sussexes living out their own version of Sunset Boulevard in their Montecito mansion.

I blame the Brontës for the fact that men like Mike Tindall aren’t what more young women aspire to; that early exposure to Heathcliff and Mr Rochester gives us the notion that a man who is emotionally unstable is a catch. But, like Maoism and love-bites, what looks becoming on the young is cringeworthy in the old. The Byronic Bad Boy – who ages into a superannuated Violet Elizabeth Bott – is best summed up by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm, writing of a comparatively rare female example of the type:

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Persons of Aunt Ada's temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves! They were the sort that went trampling all over your pet stamp collection, or whatever it was, and then spent the rest of their lives atoning for it. But you would rather have had your stamp collection.

The current climate of feelings and emotions being the most important ingredient in a fully-lived life has been a gift to these blowhards. ‘It’s better than bottling it up!’ we’re repeatedly told – excuse me, the Kray twins? Those men who contribute to the fact that two women are killed every week in the UK by their partners or ex-partners are certainly showing their feelings; a bit more bottling it up – especially from men – wouldn’t go amiss. Where one finds sensitive men one often finds petulance – and if there’s a worse non-violent character flaw in a man, I can’t think of it. (I could easily excuse a man who wasn’t faithful – if you want loyalty, get a dog – but never a petulant one.) 

I partly blame Kate Bush for these giant toddlers, ever metaphorically filling their nappies after some imagined slight. If a man is creative, he’s more likely to have a Magic Mirror anyway; I’m sure Ian McEwan peers into the looking-glass and sees Harry Styles, judging from his pronouncement at an anti-Brexit conference when he was 68 years young: ‘A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5 million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.’ But once he’s heard ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ he’ll be convinced that he’s forever young, even when his teeth in a mug by the bed are the first sight to greet him each morning.

Occasionally, volatile men can be Cry-Bullies, the term I invented in this magazine in 2015: ‘A hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper’ – extremely applicable to that king of the superannuated Bad Boys Johnny Depp. How much more attractive is the man who doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for himself! Ann Miller put it well in On The Town’s standout number ‘Prehistoric Man’:

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No psychoanalysis

He never knew what made him tick

He never paid, it seems, for telling his dreams

No repression

He just believed in free self-expression

He had honest calluses

He never worked to pile up dough

So unlike you and me, no ulcers had he

Simple and free, in the long ago… prehistoric Joe!

And if that’s not enough, the traditional man often makes a better feminist than his arty brothers; think of the athlete Daley Thompson and the ex-cop Harry Miller allying with women to protect our rights compared with those snivelling little actors turning on J.K. Rowling. With Zara often ‘up early and riding out with her horses’ says a source, Mike happily attends to their children. ‘I was always comfortable just lifting and shifting,’ he says of the manual work he did between leaving school and becoming a professional sportsman.

I’ve been married to three writers, so I obviously haven’t practised what I’m preaching. Thankfully, my third husband, though certainly not a broken-nosed rugby player, is (for a writer) more straightforward than most men I’ve known – and being hardly straightforward myself, it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to expect a Magic Mike-alike. But I would advise young women that if they have a choice between a straightforward man and a pound-shop Heathcliff, take the former. Because as you get older, the stormy rows which ended in wild make-up sex will turn to low-level bickering ending with the kettle being put on as, inevitably, such pairings become less Burton and Taylor – and more Hinge and Bracket.