SOMEONE, somewhere, please stop Louise Linton, the actor and wife of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who seems to have decided that the best way to follow up her now infamous Instagram designer clothes and tax sacrifice bragging, is with a magazine shoot in which she wears ridiculously extravagant ball gowns.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could produce something of greater privilege-cringe than Linton’s postings of last month, which began when she shared a photograph of herself disembarking from a US Airforce jet in Kentucky tagged with a hash list of designer labels for everything she was wearing, from #tomford sunnies to #valentinorockstudheels. Soon after, following a critical post that said, “Glad we could pay for your getaway #deplorable”, Linton retaliated with an excruciating torrent of boasting and emoticons that somehow seemed to manage to be aggressive while also declaring the commenter "Adorable!”
“Pretty sure,” the actor wrote, “the amount [in taxes] we sacrifice per year is more than the amount you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours.” It didn’t take long before Linton was being described in Vanity Fair magazine as “going full Marie Antoinette”.
So, what does she then do? As an act of contrition, she turns up in Washington Post magazine, looking like a modern-day Marie Antoinette, though slightly more mournful-looking, as if trying to suggest that even while she’s wearing these dresses she’s thinking about homeless people and stray dogs – for Linton does have her causes, and one of them is chihuahuas.
“It’s clear,” she says, “that I was the one who was out of touch and my approach was reactionary and condescending … It was an out-of-character knee-jerk reaction.” But it’s hard to buy it, when she’s draped in a glamorous red Ines di Santo "trumpet" dress.
Some advisor surely has to explain what “out of touch” really means. Because it’s getting painful now, particularly for us in Scotland, given she’s a Scot, and not just the son-of-a-Scot like Trump, but a real bona fide Scot who grew up in a castle and went to Fettes College, before going on to pursue an acting career in the United States. Linton’s public life, beyond her work, up until now, has been a series of privilege-gaffes, from the memoir she wrote about her gap year in Zambia which was criticised by Africans as inaccurate and exhibiting "First World arrogance” and "white saviour complex", to the interview she gave Town And Country magazine about her jewellery collection, which resulted in such groanworthy quotes as: “You never really own a diamond. You just get to keep it for a while before it begins a new journey with someone else.”
In recent weeks, we even learned that her husband Mnuchin had investigated the possibility of getting use of a government jet for the newly married couple's European honeymoon earlier this year.
So please, someone stop all this. Although, of course, it’s not really Linton that needs to be stopped, it’s the whole Trump administration parade – which looks increasingly out of touch and regal. It’s a show in which older men parade their younger wives and daughters, in which Ivanka Trump publishes a book, Women Who Work, which seems solely aimed at an elite, and in which women are accessories, used to create political lifestyle brands for their partners and a political regime.
From the Tom Ford sunnies to the anti-abortion policies, there’s nothing adorable in any of it.
Mogg-mentable
Speaking of people who seem more than a little out of touch, we have a few here in the UK. There's even a grassroots movement called Moggmentum, designed to get one of them – the North East Somerset MP Jacob Rees Mogg – into Number 10 as our next Prime Minister. The full extent of Mogg’s remove from ordinary realities was on display in an interview with LBC radio, in which he described the rise of foodbanks and the efforts of their volunteers, as “rather uplifting”. The Eton-educated MP revealed that he knows a thing or two about food banks, and that one of these things is that the rise in numbers using them can be attributed to the fact that people now “know they are there”. Nothing to do with the impact of austerity or welfare reform, then?
Perhaps he also thinks that the rise in homeless people on the streets of England (up 134 per cent), which was demonstrated last week in figures from the National Audit Office (NAO), has happened simply because people have realised the streets are there? An underused resource of doorways and alleys? Would he find something in this rise, attributed by the NAO to the impact of welfare reform, “rather uplifting” too?
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