Fashion Disaster

‘TONY Blair is well known for his natty, and expensive, dress sense. If he’s not decked out in a £600 suit in the House of Commons, he’s sporting designer sweaters at Australian barbeques or other casual, yet stylish, knitwear in the south of France.

Tony sports Anorak’s new knitwear range

But this morning, the Independent publishes a picture of the Prime Minister wearing a suit that cost the whole of Britain £1 billion.

Sadly for our fashion-conscious leader, it’s not an Armani. Nor is the yellow plastic creation the work of out-there designer Alexander McQueen.

The ensemble was put together by the Department of Agriculture, and proved to be a very costly mistake.

”It seemed a good idea for Tony Blair to don a protective yellow suit and visit a farm at the height of last year’s foot-and-mouth crisis,” says the Indy.

”But the image proved disastrous in North America, frightening off tens of thousands of potential visitors to the UK.” Guess yellow just isn’t Tony’s colour.

”It was a disaster,” says one source at Whitehall, where ”officials reckon the photograph alone may have cost Britain £1 billion in lost revenue”.

”I admit this didn’t cross my mind,” confesses Labour’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell. ”You get these dramatic pictures of the Prime Minister wearing yellow suits, walking around a farmyard, and in America they think, ‘Christ! He’s got to wear a yellow suit!’.”

And indeed, to a man so deeply concerned with image, that has to be a fate worse than death atop a smouldering pyre of diseased farmyard stock.

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Posted: 28th, August 2002 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink