Pierre Laval: The Man in the White Tie

Churchill's siren-suit, Chamberlain's umbrella, Harold Wilson's gannex, Baldwin's pipe, Mrs. Thatcher's hand-bag - all are appropriate. But Pierre Laval's white ties, sported from his campaign for a parliamentary seat in 1914 until his execution in October 1945, seem bizarre. Contemporaries and historians unite in stressing his reputation for wheeler-dealing, hence his nickname 'the horse-trader'. His apparent lack of principle prompted Vincent Auriol to maintain that 'everything about him is black, his clothes, his face, his soul. Whether you spell his name backwards or forwards, he will always be Laval'. The British historian David Thomson stressed that 'it was his policies that were shabby, not his clothes', while Alfred Cobban called him 'one of nature's go-betweens'. Marshal Pétain, who headed the Vichy administration in France from 1940 to 1945, was even ruder about his right-hand man: 'Ce Laval - quel fumier! ' ('What horse-shit!')