The art of the flounce

With Owen Jones very huffily leaving the Labour party, I was moved to examine the state of The Flounce in public life de nos jours. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it thus:

1. To move with exaggerated jerky or bouncy motions (‘flounced about the room, jerking her shoulders, gesticulating’ – Agatha Christie)
2. To move so as to draw attention to oneself (‘flounced into the lobby’)
3. To go with sudden determination (‘flounced out in a huff’)

Gabriel Dayan has made the amusing observation that ‘flounce is an abbreviation of fluid ounce, which is the measurement of tears from snowflakes having a meltdown’ while a recent Times headline sneered splendidly that ‘Garrick flouncers don’t fool us with their sudden principles’ regarding the sudden exit from the all-male club of civil service bigwigs. Leo Varadkar has recently flounced out of office having badly miscalculated the result of the recent Irish constitutional referendums and indeed almost every public debate over which he has ever mounted his high horse. (It’s hard to flounce while atop a high horse – but somehow the testy Taoiseach managed it.) Terry Pratchett used the word gorgeously when he declared that ‘the girl could flounce like a fat turkey on a trampoline.’

As a flounce is also ‘a strip of fabric attached by one edge, a wide ruffle,’ you’d think that females might do more of it – but anyone who has been a keen viewer of the British political scene over the past few decades will know that men can be the worst prima donnas. Jones himself is a serial flouncer with an ego as fragile as porcelain, all pent up up with petulance like a puffer fish, often appearing to be quite like the sixth-form college snitch practising his facing-a-firing-squad face for the school play. He once memorably flounced off of a televised newspaper review when the redoubtable Julia Hartley-Brewer accurately described an Islamist attack on a nightclub which ‘Talcum X’ – as he is sometimes known, due to his powdery consistency – insisted was a homophobic attack. From where I was sitting, it looked as though his absolute inability to blame Islam for anything whatsoever caused him to mentally-self combust and so off he flounced.

But whereas one expects flouncing from the flimsy likes of Owen, it can be shocking when what one previously considered grown-up politicians behave this way. Think of John Nott flouncing off (‘I’m fed up – this is ridiculous!’) when Robin Day called him ‘a transient here-today and gone-tomorrow politician’ or Michael Heseltine, a serial flouncer, over everything from Brexit to Westland as well as committing the ultimate embarrassing act of flouncing-with-menaces by grabbing at the mace and waving it around in the House of Commons in 1976 after some Welsh Labour MPs sang ‘The Red Flag’. This act was later reprised by another MP in 2018 – who coincidentally also suffers strongly from Brexit Derangement Syndrome – the ghastly Lloyd Russell-Moyle. Both men have unusual hair – perhaps this causes a predisposition for flouncing, as they share the quality with notorious political flouncers Donald Trump and George Galloway. Does it make them feel ‘leonine’, perchance, and thus see their flouncing as something fearsome and king-of-the-jungleish – as opposed to the Verruca Saltish silliness it is?

A team-flounce is a lovely thing to watch, and politics has had a few – the SDP, Change UK – but they’re doomed to failure, as flouncers by their very nature will bicker. People think this to be true of entertainers too; that’s why it was so cheering to see flouncing fellow-hood from the singing Bee Gee brothers on the Clive Anderson show in 1997 – maybe the only ever case of three-way fraternal flouncing. Usually flouncing is solely driven by ego, especially in entertainment. The best example being Roger Waters, who left Pink Floyd apparently believing that the band would fold without him, and displaying hilariously bad grace when they not only survived but flourished in his absence. But everyone has their own favourite celebrity flounce. Cilla Black quitting Blind Date live on air. Johnny Rotten from Juke Box Jury. Joan Rivers being asked about wearing fur on CNN. Leo Sayer scarpering from the Celebrity Big Brother house over the lack of clean undies. Paris Hilton teetering off like a wounded whippet after being asked ‘Do you think your moment has passed?’ Taylor Swift putting her publicist on the phone after a DJ kept asking her to talk about the VMA debacle. Gordon Ramsay walking out after being asked if he used Botox. Russell Crowe getting cross over someone detecting ‘a hint of Irish’ in his Robin Hood accent. Kanye West doing anything – that man could flounce out of his own funeral. In these modern times of ours, a flounce doesn’t need to be physical. The writer Michele Kirsch (not a flouncer) says:

There’s the cyber-flounce, which is when people declare, with great solemnity, that they are going off Facebook or Twitter or Insta or all social media – and again, when the same people say they are having a cull. They might say it’s for Mental Elf but it’s really a way to get people to say ‘Oh, gosh, we will miss you, hope you are OK!’ But surely if you do go off social media, the whole point is to go off it quietly, without a big announcement; you just leave for a while until curiosity gets the better of you. But if you tell people you are going off it, you have to stay on it to respond to all the nice people sending thoughts and prayers and heart emojis.

This can often cause a ‘reverse-flounce’ which is the social media equivalent of when Eric Heffer attempted to storm out of a meeting of Labour’s national executive – shouting ‘I’m going!’ – only to walk not into one, but two, broom cupboards, before slamming his papers down and admitting ‘I’m stopping after all…’ Stephen Fry memorably had an epic hissy-fit on the then-Twitter which saw him threaten to quit in 2009 (because just one follower out of his millions called him ‘boring’), quit briefly in 2014, leave again in 2016, return and leave again in 2022.

Are we are past the glory days of flouncing? I thought so until Harry and Meghan did their thing, flouncing not just between European countries but across actual continents. We are short on patience with very rich people having temper tantrums in these hard times. Prince Edward’s flouncing out of a press conference which he found insufficiently enthusiastic about his pet project It’s A Royal Knockout has not weathered well; instead we yearn for the late Queen, the most unflouncy woman imaginable, who was so annoyed about the one time she was portrayed as such (accused by the BBC of flouncing out of a photoshoot in 2007) that she actually complained for once, leaving the BBC to apologise – to renounce the flounce, in fact. It’s probably good that the flounce is dying out, seeing as it is generally the mark of self-important narcissists – but while Owen Jones continues to prance and posture upon the public stage, I feel that a flounce is never far away.