Charles Moore notebook: Trump's liberal media allies, Hunt at the V&A, and Lord Snowdon's polonecks 

The liberal media were shocked exactly as Mr Trump must have hoped. They denounced what they saw as his monstrous rudeness to a legislator (who – an important unmentioned subtext – is black), and underplayed Mr Lewis’s actually more temperature-raising point. The BBC, which always follows the agenda of the US liberal media and so is slightingly referred to by Mr Trump as “another beauty”, reported the story yesterday almost entirely as Mr Trump’s unacceptable tweet. You had to wait until the end of the item to discover why the President-elect said what he did.

Every time something like this happens, Mr Trump’s reaches over the media to his supporters in the country and says, in effect: “See! They want to silence me.”

If the liberal media seriously wishes to undermine Mr Trump they need to start catching him out when he breaks his promises to the blue-collar voters who put him into the White House, not when he smashes their own icons.

Tristram Hunt at the V&A

It is good news for Tristram Hunt that he is to become director of the V&A. Some say that it is not good news for the V&A: why should a Labour MP be any good at running a great national museum? You wouldn’t reverse the process and make Dr Martin Roth, the V&A Director who resigned because he was so upset about Brexit, leader of the Labour Party, would you?

Well, I doubt if Dr Roth could be less successful than poor Jeremy Corbyn, but let that pass. The key point is that Mr Hunt was not a natural MP and he is a natural panjandrum of the arts world. I first spotted this myself when I was interviewed by him at the Stoke Literary Festival about my biography of Margaret Thatcher.

It can be torture for an author to be interviewed by a politician about a politician because what most politicians really want to talk about is themselves, and there is no yarn they like spinning more than how they stood up to the Iron Lady. But Mr Hunt was quite different: he actually wanted to ask about the subject, and his way of doing so was that of the historian which he is. I admired him for this, and at the same time realised how agonising it must be for him to be fighting political battles in a Labour Party now hostile to his thoughtful moderation. I think he will love the V&A in the way that he could never love the 21st-century Labour Party, and bring his outstanding communicative gifts to the task.

Note, too, that Mr Hunt’s appointment did not leak. The Government, which is of course kept informed about such senior public jobs, could easily have made trouble about the prospect of yet another pinkish person entering the world of the arts, but in fact it seems to have gone out of its way to ease Mr Hunt’s passage. Thus the Tories do their little bit to promote Mr Corbyn’s ascendancy over Labour, and hence Labour’s exclusion from power.

Lord Snowdon's polonecks

Lord Snowdon, who died last week, was fashionable and artistic. In the Sixties, this often involved wearing black (or, occasionally, white) polo-neck jerseys in formal settings. I remember hearing a news story on the radio at the time which revealed that Lord Snowdon had been refused entry to a posh New York restaurant because he was wearing just such a polo-neck rather than a tie. The British slant was to mock the Americans: if you aspire to grandeur, you must admit members of the Royal family (Lord Snowdon was at that time married to Princess Margaret) to your premises.

But I have now come to see that the New York restaurant was brave and right. Although there is, perhaps, nothing notably offensive about the black polo-neck, the point about the jacket-and-tie rule was that it restrained men – particularly white men from northern Europe and North America – from our natural tendency to look appalling. Something about having to have a collar, and a piece of cloth inside it, prevented sartorial mayhem. Lord Snowdon himself may have looked very dapper, but innovators like he opened the floodgates to T-shirts and shorts and trainers, thus, over time, destroying the sense of occasion which used to make good restaurants, hotels and theatres glamorous. As Shakespeare put it: “Untune that string, and hark what discord follows.”