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Liz Truss, heavily tipped to be the next leader of the Conservative party, would like to get into Vogue. We know this because she asked the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, how to go about it at the Cop26 climate conference last November. Sturgeon said Truss “looked a little bit as if she’d swallowed a wasp” when she told her she had made its pages twice.
“This is going to sound really up myself but I don’t mean to … I’d just been interviewed by Vogue, as you do … that was the main thing she wanted to talk to me about – she wanted to know how she could get into Vogue”, Sturgeon told an Edinburgh fringe event last week.
The discussion may have been relatively neutral at the time, but its public airing confirmed the tense relationship between the two – one already politically powerful and the other on the verge of becoming so. Earlier in the week, Truss had labelled the Scottish National party leader an “attention seeker” and told a hustings in Exeter that “the best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is to ignore her”.
But it poses the question: why is acceptance or non-acceptance by a 130-year-old magazine important to politicians? And what is it about Vogue’s image enhancement that sets political figures off on both sides of the Atlantic?
In purely political terms, says James Schneider, former communications director for Jeremy Corbyn (who graced the pages of GQ), a magazine story and its cover may reach people outside the realm of typical messaging. It stays in circulation for a month and lies around for longer.
“That’s the upside,” he says. “The downside risk is looking stupid, crass, out of touch or it being off-key in some particular way.” When Corbyn appeared in GQ, his team insisted on high street clothing, according to Schneider. “Normally, the magazine would try to make people seem cool in a conventional way and aspirational in a consumer way. That’s not Jeremy’s vibe and we didn’t want it to look like his day out in 900-quid Gucci shoes.”
But, he says, it’s not surprising that Truss might want a show on Vogue’s pages. “Liz Truss is very Instagram so I’m sure she’d love it. And I’m sure if she wants to be in Vogue after September she will be. She’ll be trying to recreate Mrs Thatcher’s greatest outfits in any magazine she likes.”
A Vogue spread can be contentious. Liz Tilberis, who ran both UK Vogue and US Harper’s Bazaar, used to coax celebrity subjects by pointing out that the lovely picture could sit on their piano.
