It was but seven summers ago when the government’s Social Mobility Commission said that if you wanted to be an investment banker a brown shoe was as positive for your career prospects as having a neck tattoo. That view seems prehistoric now.
But times change, people change, the world changes. No more so than in Downing Street. Or rather, when the occupant of Downing Street burdened himself on the British Border Force on Monday morning. His shoes were brown, they were big, and they were boots made by Timberland, the brand favoured by the late rapper TUPAC.
Some wags on Twitter suggested that his coastal visit was not so much about “stopping the boats”, as his party terms it, but rather should be about stopping the boots. As the old adage goes, “Don’t trust a man in brown shoes.”
He looked like a cross between a hipster lumberjack and a scout master from Stoke
We can only assume that the product of Winchester and Oxford - such as he is - was affecting what he thought was a man of action pose. In fact, he looked like a cross between a hipster lumberjack and a scout master from Stoke. You can only wonder who is advising him on his clothes. You might also wonder if that person has eyes.
One of the most interesting things was that those on twitter didn’t so much make fun of the fact he was wearing boots with suit trousers and shirt, but rather that those boots were brown.
There has long been a peculiar snobbery about brown shoes. It all began with an off-hand comment by the supreme big-cheese that was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India for Queen Victoria and Edward VII, “a gentleman never wears brown in town” he said. His influence ran large. And this rather silly pronouncement became almost gospel for the London beau monde. This was in his latter years, and as Winston Churchill said of Curzon’s career and life: “The morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead.” So, perhaps that lead had gone to his head.
Stop The Boots pic.twitter.com/AZioAwaWbb
— Grifters Paradise (@GriftParadise) June 5, 2023
For those termed “gentlemen” the brown shoe was to only be worn in the brown mud of the countryside. For the rest of us, such mores never entered the mind. Why would it? A shoe is a shoe, after all.
Who can doubt the valour and dash of an RAF pilot. Before the first World War, pilots wore brown shoes. And they did so because the airfield dust would make a gent’s shoes unsmart. For the same reason, sailors in the navy wore black shoes because of the coal and tar. Practicality reigned supreme and sensibly so.
Shoes, for some, carry a message. Sometimes that message is rather forthright. As in when the Wrexham striker Paul Mullin wore boots with the words “f*** the tories” plastered across them. The club let it slide once, but decreed it was too rich a brew for them. Our cousins across the ocean are more direct in their ire. In 2016, one of the Vice Presidents of New Balance trainers, Matt LeBretton, said “things are going to move in the right direction.” He was referring to the presidency of Donald Trump. He added for good measure that under President Obama, “a deaf ear” had been turned to New Balance. It remains unclear what level of importance trainers rate in the day to day workload of a US president. Many people, it was reported, burned their New Balance trainers.
The Prime Minister is not the first politician to be lampooned for their choice of shoes. In 2019 Diane Abbott was eviscerated for wearing two odd shoes. To be fair, we have all had those half-awake moments. Much to my mother’s annoyance I haven’t worn matched socks probably since the London Olympics in 2012. Mornings are not easy, after all.
More than the fact the Prime Minister was wearing boots, and boots of brown at that, is that those boots came from New Hampshire in the US of A. Was it some political message?
Perhaps some inducement to President Biden to do a favourable trade deal. Who can say. But one thing is clear, as a country, it’s time to stop the boots, Prime Minister.
