The lost art of the bow tie

Whatever you think about Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab – whether you think he’s bully or a tomato-thrower, and whether you couldn’t care less if he is or isn’t – there is something you ought to know about him. Apparently, he can’t do up a bow tie.

That’s according to the Financial Times journalist Sebastian Payne and his forthcoming book about the last days of Boris Johnson’s government. He tells the story of Raab arriving to counsel the Prime Minister during his last hours in Downing Street, dressed in white tie. ‘Raab awkwardly told Number 10 staffers he had to attend a white-tie dinner at the Mansion House in the City of London that evening, but required assistance with the outfit. An attendant was found with the skills to fix his bow tie.’

An attendant was found with the skills to fix his bow tie. Have standards of British public life ever been quite so damned in just 12 words?

Dominic Raab can’t do up a bow tie. And nor, it seems, could the coterie of those around Boris – or perhaps they didn’t want to get too close to him to do it? Either way, it looks bad.

Because to my mind, a Tory grandee who can’t tie a bow tie is like a Labour bigwig who doesn’t know the words to ‘The Red Flag’. They’re a bungee short of the full roof rack. And that’s because, if nothing else, the Tory party is still a very black-tie party – you know it, don’t you? The men at least. These are people who love nothing more than squeezing into a 35-year-old cummerbund and listening to an after-dinner speech having drizzled three courses down their dress shirts.

Raab stands for the party of Winston Churchill – he is a lineal political descendent of the man who, don’t forget, didn’t just wear a bow tie more or less daily but also masterminded the defeat of the world’s most fearsome war machine as well as the world’s most odious regime while doing so. It’s not going too far to say that Churchill saved the world while wearing a bow tie.

Eight decades on and of course things have changed, but not that much. So we really expected to believe that for decades Raab climbed the greasy pole of politics – through party conferences, receptions, fundraisers and even a stint as Foreign Secretary – without doing up a single bow tie? Does he have a valet, or has he had a doting other half to do it all along? Or has he been secretly wearing one of those ready-made ties on a piece of elastic? That would be tragic.

In short, little speaks of the decline of the quality of individuals entering public life than this. An elastic bow tie is the definition of hollowed-out public service.

Yet in Raab we have a grammar-school educated man who attended Oxford – captained the karate team there, apparently, so he knows how to do up a belt – and then did a masters at Cambridge. Did he learn nothing during his time at two of the world’s greatest universities? Perhaps a Saturday job at Moss Bros would have helped.

I would say that unless he is burdened by a disability that we can’t see – such as crippling arthritis in his hands, and no laughing matter – then it is inexcusable for him not to be able to do his own tie up. And if he can’t do it, why can’t he learn to? Even if one has some reservations about his cerebral firepower (more torpid than Tirpitz), surely learning how to do a bow tie cannot be too onerous. I sincerely hope that Sebastian Payne has got the wrong end of the stick somehow but I dare say there’s no way of telling.

We may well live in the age of shirtsleeves politics, one where shirt collars are left open more than your local branch of Tesco. But, surely, trusting politicians to know how to do up a bow tie really oughtn’t be beyond the realms of expectation. And if a bow tie is too challenging, then perhaps it’s no wonder that things like HS2, boats in the Channel or Sizewell C seem to leave our leading political figures in knots.