How I became Miss World 1970

‘Miss World 1970’ is the rather glorious title that Jennifer Hosten won. That was the year that the contest, then the greatest show on earth, was disrupted by feminist activists, who threw flour bombs at the host, Bob Hope. It is retrospectively called the foundation of the woman’s movement.The immediate trigger was Hope’s gag that he was happy to be in a ‘cattle market’, after which he mooed. The contest, and the protest, now dramatised in the film Misbehaviour, stars Keira Knightley — a world-class beauty — as Sally Alexander, the feminist leading the attack on the objectification of women that Miss World embodies. But cinema only slenderly knows feminism: the film Suffragette featured the equally beautiful Carey Mulligan as an oppressed laundress.

Hosten’s book is not good. It is written in the quasi-royal style of a press release put out by a semi-fictional great lady; but it is fascinating if you don’t know any successful beauty queens. I do — and the best ones I’ve met are like Hosten. Perhaps as a protective measure (you cannot be this lovely and still safe unless your words and behaviour summon an invisible burka around you), they are intensely poised: they exude sexlessness, and resemble tiny icons to be worshipped rather than women. They are very charming, but they are waxy and remote, engaged in a competitive purity contest that feels like a circus of denial. I long to watch them cut loose.

Hosten was Miss Grenada, the first black woman to win Miss World, and her book provides a handy how-to-do-it guide. Beauty is not enough: one must take princess lessons. She describes, in very literal prose, how she won, and it’s the same way as with any war: logistics.