There’s a reason some of us would never get hired as a fashion writer. If tasked with, say, describing Britain’s latest sporting mega star’s arrival at the Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday, it would have read something like this: “Emma Raducanu turned up at the James Bond premiere in a very nice silvery dress and waved at everyone. End.”
This is how the pros do it: “Emma looked ethereal as she made a dazzling arrival in a silver maxi dress . . . the asymmetrical number featured a coordinating string belt which highlighted her toned waist . . . her gorgeous dark brown locks cascaded behind her shoulders from a sleek middle parting and she enhanced her natural beauty with a minimum amount of makeup.”
Earlier in the week, the same Daily Mail, the paper that has stopped just short of labelling Raducanu Britain’s new Queen of Hearts, just, eh, happened to spot her walking along a London street. “Emma wore her raven locks sleekly around her shoulders and displayed a creamy visage of natural make-up. She tied back her mane later on as she strolled along . . . ”
You’d be inclined to say, ‘ah lads, stop’, not least because there’s a bit of a eeeeeeew tone to these observations from grown men about an 18-year-old, the use of ‘ethereal’, ‘cascading raven locks’ and ‘creamy visage’ making her sound like something out of a Mills & Boon novel.
Mind you, their approval of her not using much make-up is somewhat at odds with their regular “OMG, this is what (insert female celebrity’s name) looks like WITHOUT make-up!” pieces. You can’t win with that crew.
But, this class of coverage almost came as a relief because until then there’d been an avalanche of opinion pieces where Raducanu, if she’d the misfortune to read them, would have felt like the ball in an interminable rally, battered back and forth. A few headlines, to give you a flavour:
“Raducanu: A multicultural star is born; will Priti turn back migrant boats?”; “Exploiting Raducanu’s victory to peddle a leftist agenda is a double fault for democracy”; “The Britain of Emma Raducanu shows why nationalists are losing the argument”; “Why couldn’t hate-filled trolls of the Left celebrate Emma’s brilliant British win without weaponising it for their toxic culture wars?”; “US Open tennis Ace Emma Raducanu proves how migrants make us a winning nation”.
Hold it, there’s more.
“Raducanu is a brilliant one off. We could struggle to find another from this generation of snowflakes”; “Emma Raducanu helps excise the cancer of Nigel Farage’s nasty worldview”; “Emma Raducanu’s success is an immigrant fairytale the Home Office doesn’t want you to believe in”.
And on and on. You’d be exhausted.
Granted, that Raducanu was born in Canada to a Romanian father and a mother of Chinese heritage, and grew up in England, an interest in her background was natural enough, but the ensuing attempted hijacking of her back story to bolster one view or another made you wish the only people permitted to write about her were tennis reporters.
Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera suggested Raducanu’s victory showed that “immigration enriches us, and always has done”. “By that logic,” The Spectator’s Douglas Murray replied, “these people ought to have been thrilled at the news from Dover last week, where almost 1,000 future winners of the US Open crossed the Channel in a single day.”
The Mirror’s Brian Reade, meanwhile, noted that “if we’d had Brexit 16 years ago, stopping all those Eastern Europeans coming here to ‘take our jobs’, Emma wouldn’t have been allowed in”.
Over at the New European, Matt Kelly: “You’re Emma Raducanu. You’re the new US Open Champion. You’re 18 and you won with such pzazz and open-hearted warmth . . . it should be enough. But nothing is ever enough to escape the gravitational pull of political point-scoring these days. She’s a young woman whose brilliance on the tennis court we can all relish and all be proud of. It’s more than enough.”
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown had something to say on the matter too, suggesting that the example of Raducanu, and the image of British diversity that she represents, weakened the arguments for Welsh and Scottish independence because Britain could remain united while accommodating and respecting different identities.
Tom Slater in Spiked sharpened his pen. “These people could not help but racialise Raducanu. They all felt compelled to rattle off her ethnic background even before getting around to congratulating her. There was an undeniable compulsion to portray her primarily as an immigrant, as mixed-race, not as a fellow Brit or even just a remarkable human being.”
Nodding while reading a Spiked article was an excruciating first, leaving you wondering if you’d banged your head on a sharp object, rendering your judgement impaired.
But Slater wasn’t wrong. Well-meaning as these commentators might have been, their take on Raducanu was very terrible, not least because, as some dissenters pointed out, they portrayed her as the ‘good immigrant’, one who had brought sporting glory to her adopted homeland and therefore earned the right to be embraced.
Much as they did when Mo Farah was at his peak, or Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, of Caribbean and African descent, before they missed penalties.
Georgina Lawton, in the Guardian, summed it up. “How much do we in the UK really value the lives of immigrant families such as the Raducanus, when, instead of achieving greatness on the world stage, they’re living ordinary lives, often in the roles of the low-paid essential workers who keep the country running?”
You won’t read many dazzling, ethereal, creamy visage pieces about them.
