My View: Stephanie Smith

You can tell it’s the silly season when the Prime Minister’s footwear comes under scrutiny.

David Cameron is being slated for wearing work-style loafers with no socks while holidaying in Tuscany. A really horrible looking pair of loafers they are too – what I call “slippy shoes”, because they look creepy and slimy. You see men wearing them all the time, usually with cheap-looking suits, although they are generally the preserve of the middle-aged, professional males rooted in the privileged classes – or trying to look as if they are. As you can see, I understand the horror, revulsion even, evoked by footwear, as it’s something I share. I am not proud of it, but I can’t help it.

It’s been there since childhood – a loathing of some types of shoe, mainly men’s, although some women’s, too. Most of all, I hate loafers (both slippy work-style and casual boat-style), especially without socks, as they look smelly and suggest the braying, rugby-playing, often unpleasant types I first encountered at university. I like brogues, especially brown ones, so it’s not a class thing, more an aesthetic thing, a feeling of unease and distaste for what the sloppy, slippery look of a shoe might say about the wearer.

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But does it really matter what our PM wears on holiday? Does the revulsion I and others feel say more about us than it does about him? Perhaps it does and we shouldn’t be so shallow, snooty and judgmental. Disappointing, though, that Samantha Cameron, for all her alleged style cred, is blind to a certain breed of bad taste, although maybe not surprising. Ironically, some of those middle-class types currently roaming Tuscany and Provence in their chinos and loafers are precisely the ones who like to refer to a certain sector of society as “chavs” and sneer at those who wear tracksuits in the manner of Vicky Pollard, the gross underclass creation of comedian Matt Lucas.

In his book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, Owen Jones argues that the rise of so-called “chav culture” was created and then mercilessly derided by a middle-class pandering, rightwing media, which identified a certain type of person it felt was flash, vulgar, lazy and usually drunk. Owen counterblasts the notion that Britain is now a classless society. Instead, it’s one in which there are fewer and fewer escape routes for those born into working-class families as Britain increasingly becomes a society run by the wealthy for the wealthy.

I have been guilty of using the word “chav”, usually about a specific person I encounter, perhaps someone whose tattoos, language, spitting and, yes, tracksuits I find distasteful. I won’t be using it any longer, and I’ll keep my ears open for those who use “chav” to describe an entire sector of people, as a useful shorthand for ridiculing and keeping down the less privileged in our society. Although, if I see someone wearing a trackie with loafers, I doubt I’ll be able to rein in my utterly horrified revulsion.